April Fool’s Forum
It would be nice if all the ridiculous news was, in fact, just an April Fool's joke...
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, April 1, 2026
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30 comments
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About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science and former College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
Follow Steven on
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BlueSky.
First day of Passover.
This is the week Zombie Jesus comes back, right?
Good grief.
– Trump plans to address the nation this evening. (Yawn.)
– Kristi Noem’s husband received some interesting coverage in the Daily Mail yesterday.
– Trump is continuing to harass Greenland.
– Apparently, the President has enough free time to spend the day at the Supreme Court to listen to oral arguments about birthright citizenship.
– Kegsbreath overruled Army disciplinary action for the two helicopter pilots who buzzed a No Kings crowd and them zipped over to Kid Rock’s house
None of these are April Fool’s jokes.
@Jen:
Was just about to write about this continuing undermining of good order and discipline. A topic the unqualified Defense Secretary does not understand.
Hegseth lifts suspensions of Army helicopter crews who flew over Kid Rock’s Nashville home
Apparently Hegseth does not.
Trump’s Cabinet retreats behind military gates
And, of course, taking housing away from career military that spent decades earning their privileges.
Oh, FFS.
Marines warn of ICE presence at Parris Island boot camp events
Come celebrate your family’s patriotism and risk getting deported. What a message!
I’ve decided that a lunar mission which can’t match what Apollo 8 accomplished in 1968 but gets taken very seriously, and is trumpeted as a great milestone, makes for a very expensive April fool’s day joke.
Interesting piece at HuffPost relating Fatso’s failures on both COVID and Iran.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-iran-war-covid_n_69cc19f7e4b039d10fc76d2c?utm_source=buzzfeed&utm_medium=iframely
@Jen:
Yes, Bryon Noem appears to be a cross-dresser. Not very MAGA of him, is it?
@Kathy:
Trumpeted,
@Jen:
The stock market has already rallied on news of what he plans to say, withdraw in 2 to 3 weeks, let other countries deal with the strait being closed. Oil price futures sold off. I totally do not understand why the stock markets are up and oil down on this news.
@charontwo:
As far as the oil futures, the traders believe that the strait’s closure will be resolved with the felon out of the picture, even if it is years before full capacity is restored. The stock market is simply a good news bounce driven by speculators that are hoping to sell the stocks they bought when the last bit of bad news was announced.
@charontwo: @Sleeping Dog: The stock market has always been an insider game in which the select few take advantage of the naivete of the many. The correlation between Wall Street and Main Street is a myth nurtured by politicians and uncritically recited by credulous political reporters.*
*Historians will look back at Trump’s reign of error and conclude it was the result of a failure of the media to accurately and consistently portray him as grossly unfit for the presidency (or any public office).
@Charley in Cleveland:
Indeed I feel like we should revert to an age of nominations decided in smoke filled rooms. Every significant city having two daily papers, one avowedly Republican, one Democratic. And widespread union membership.
If Trump is indeed at the Court’s oral arguments on birthright citizenship, the questions being asked seem to indicate they are not intimidated.
@Jen: If the Judiciary is indeed a co-equal branch of government, I idly wonder if Chief Justice Roberts would have the guts to just eject Trump from the proceedings if he chose to do so.
Sure, it would be rude but also a clear demonstration of power.
Eric Trump has unveiled a short AI assisted video of the future Trump presidential library. It looks to be over 100 stories tall.
@CSK: Because they are hoping to make it a hotel, too.
Which, frankly, should spawn a LOT of questions, the biggest one being how exactly will that work?
I’m sure this grifter family is assuming it’ll be just another one of their branded properties, but presidential libraries are owned and operated by the government (specifically, the National Archives and Records Administration), so the money SHOULD flow back to NARA. It’d be fine with me if the funds collected were spent on the entire presidential library system, there’s some amount of poetry that Trump’s money grubbing would go to pay for maintenance on Obama’s and Biden’s libraries.
@Jen:
The damned thing is smack in the middle of downtown Miami.
A hotel? Will it have a casino?
Army ups max enlistment age to 42
Does this headline suggest a short war that will be concluded in a week?
@Scott:
To me, it reeks of fear.
@CSK: @Jen:
There is a piece in the Bulwark on this.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-great-trump-library-robbery
So land obtained by Trump library for $10, such a princely sum. State college, so no way to defy the governor about conveying this very valuable property basically gratis.
Also a ballroom similar to the one at the White House. Also an auditorium complete with a 30 foot high golden statue of Trump.
Built with donations from various companies ingratiating themselves to Trump.
Headline on MSN news:
US Treasury approves President Trump’s plan to phase out all paper money in favor of crypto, gold coins
From the article:
The plan calls for a full phase-out of paper money in favor of two new official forms of payment: TrumpCoin, a blockchain-based digital currency, and a line of gold coins embossed with the president’s likeness in denominations of $5, $20, $100 and what the Treasury memo describes simply as “the big one.”
As fucked up as this country is, I knew it was an April Fool’s joke when I saw the paper money would be phased out by 2027. Trump would never extend a con for more than a few months.
Not a bad joke but my favorite that I’ve heard about was this one:
In 1977, the British newspaper The Guardian published a seven-page “special report” about San Serriffe, a small republic located in the Indian Ocean consisting of several semi-colon-shaped islands. A series of articles described the geography and culture of this obscure nation.
The report generated a huge response. The Guardian’s phones rang all day as readers sought more information about the idyllic holiday spot. However, San Serriffe did not actually exist. The report was an elaborate April Fool’s Day joke — one with a typographical twist, since numerous details about the island (such as its name) alluded to printer’s terminology.
The hoax was amazingly detailed and many staff writers contributed. They had separate sections with analyses of San Seriffe’s politics, economy and culture.
More punishment for the American people for daring to confront Trump and his Homeland Security:
TSA announces new policy: All travelers will need clear carry-on bags starting this summer
Will our gutless congresscritters actually grow a spine and say no?
Oh wait! Did I just fall for an April Fool’s joke? It’s so hard to tell these days.
@Scott:
@Lucys Football:
I have noticed a considerable decline in the number of “April Fool’s” emails received from brands this year. My guess is that things are weird enough that a lot of these jokes just fall flat in the face of reality.
For contrast with Artemis, it helps to see how the Apollo missions worked.
Apollo made use of the Saturn V rocket. Specs aside, it had three stages. the first two were enough to put the third stage* plus the capsule and lunar lander in Earth orbit. The third stage provided the thrust for the translunar injection orbit.
Artemis uses the Space Launch System**. Specs aside, it has two stages. These are enough to put the Orion capsule in a higher Earth orbit, and that’s it. The translunar injection thrust comes from Orion’s engines on the service module.
Both take what’s known as a free return trajectory. This means absent any further changes in velocity, the spaceships will return to Earth after rounding the far side of the Moon. For Apollo, this was a safety measure. If something went wrong and the main engine in the service module couldn’t be used, as happened on Apollo 13, the capsule could still return to Earth***. For Artemis, it’s all the system can manage.
Apollo fired its main engine in order to get into orbit around the Moon. from there, landing could take place using the lunar module attached to the nose of the command module. Orion’s main engine lacks the fuel to do this.
*I’m unsure whether the third stage was fired to achieve orbit. If so, it was then fired again for the translunar injection maneuver.
** That will do for a bland name until a better (worse?) one comes along.
*** Apollo 13 actually fired the lunar module’s engine to change it’s trajectory, but this was not strictly necessary. That is, absent the LM’s engine, it would still have returned to Earth. As it happened, thrust from the LM’s engine speeded the return home.
Well, Artemis 2 launched.
We can tell Adolf had nothing to do with it, because it didn’t blow up.
The Artemis is launched with just a couple of tense moments.
I haven’t watched a launch since witnessing the Challenger tragedy.
So far, so good. Wishing the whole NASA team all the best.
@becca:
SpaceX and the Falcon 9 have changed people’s perception of rocket launches. >620 launches total, averaged almost three per week last year, >590 landings, most used booster landed for the 34th time last week. It’s become routine. I would also add, NASA could take telemetry PR lessons from them. SpaceX gives us live video feed from the first stage going up and landing. Live video from the second stage the whole way to orbit (except for national security missions). Live feeds from inside the Dragon capsule when that’s flying, all the way to orbit. NASA managed to provide a decent ground shot up to the side booster separation, but it was pretty weak tea compared to the Falcon Heavy video of side boosters. Then NASA was over to “visualization”, ie, animation.
Assuming no Artemis II problems, reentry information will be very 1960s. Nothing like the SpaceX feed from Starship reentry, where we get to watch the plasma build up, fins melt, all the good stuff.
I didn’t watch the speech but I saw someone on BlueSky suggest that the content seemed like someone fed all of his recent Truth Social posts through AI, asking for a summary, and he read that.
Which makes me want to both chuckle and weep.
@Jen:
The markets were not impressed.