At the beginning of 2020, President Trump presided over the finest economy in generations, and a Castro-praising socialist seemed poised to win the Democratic presidential nomination. But in just 10 weeks, Joe Biden surprisingly vanquished Bernie Sanders, and the economy came to a man-made halt to prevent the spread of a deadly pandemic. Meanwhile, the consequences of record national debt and deficits have suddenly become serious, and the chosen Democratic challenger to our philandering president faces an explosive sexual assault claim of his own.

I’m not much of a betting woman, but I’d lay down good money that there’s no coincidence to the timing of Justin Amash’s decision to start an exploratory committee to run for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination. Although presidential buzz has followed Amash since his high-profile divorce with the GOP last summer, the idiosyncratically earnest Amash publicly wavered on whether he’d enter the presidential fray. He smartly sat out a comically performative Republican primary, and given previous nominee Gary Johnson’s decision to sit out the Libertarian race, Amash had time to decide on whether to embark on an increasingly ugly congressional race or a functionally impossible presidential race.