1. It’s Tuesday, May 31, 2016.

2. The Republican establishment has gone two ways in the wake of the Trump takeover.

Last week, the guy Trump called “Little Marco” folded like a cheap tent. Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who will go down in infamy for making penis size a campaign subject, decided that Trump wasn’t so bad after all.

Now, Rubio says, he will campaign for Trump, make speeches for Trump and apologizes for any bad things he said about him. 

He joins New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie in the capitulation camp and gets back into the speculation about who Trump will pick for a running mate.

3. Then there’s the #NeverTrump movement. Right now, the leader is William Kristol, publisher of the conservative Weekly Standard, who says an “impressive” third-party candidate is on the horizon.

He won’t say who he is (I’d bet a lot of money the candidate isn’t a she), or how he’ll run a campaign that can defeat both Trump and Hillary Clinton.

Kristol joins such prominent GOP figures as Mitt Romney, New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse and the Bush family as unwavering in their refusal to bow before Trump.

At first glance, there’s some admirable about these holdouts. They understand the threat to the nation that Trump poses, that the alienation of all the groups Trump seems compelled to attack, will destroy the Republican Party as the nation’s demographics continue to change.

4. But here’s the thing: It’s one thing to understand the threat. It’s another to have enabled it. Maybe they all seriously believed that what the Republican Party stood for was diminished government, and not for a return to the kind of racism and bigotry that scarred America for generations.

It turns out you can’t have one without the other. And try, like Lady Macbeth, to wash their hands of this responsibility, it ain’t happening.

5. Here’s what Democrats have to remember: They hold the cards. As long as the people who support Bernie Sanders don’t do anything stupid, Hillary Clinton can win this thing pretty easily and put Trump and the too-late-and-too-short #NeverTrumpers away.

Trump might have helped with his statements that he would withdraw from the Paris climate change agreement and that the California drought is a hoax. Given the rightful emphasis Sanders has placed on the climate change issue, any Sanders supporter who says he or she would vote for Trump before Clinton is a hypocrite.

Democrats have the numbers in their favor. They have to unite and they have to get all the people who Trump has insulted to the polls. 

6. To that end, California Gov. Jerry Brown today endorsed Clinton. Given his prior battles with her husband, that seems like a big deal. 

Brown paid respect to Sanders and the issues he’s raised in the campaign.

But here’s how he ended his letter to Democrats and independents: “Hillary Clinton, with her long experience, especially as Secretary of State, has a firm grasp of the issues and will be prepared to lead our country on day one.”

“Next January, I want to be sure that it is Hillary Clinton who takes the oath of office, not Donald Trump.”

Amen.

1. It’s Monday, May 30, 2016.

2. It’s Memorial Day.

3. It’s a testament to human imperfection that every nation in the world has war dead to commemorate. Even the Swiss, whose famed neutrality was forged in battles with those who didn’t respect it. In whatever ways they deem appropriate, nations on every continent pay tribute to their war dead.

What makes those who fought and died for the United States of America different is they trace their origins to all the other countries of the world.

Perhaps they could have fought for the country where their families originated. Perhaps they could have gone somewhere else.

But, for whatever reason and in whatever circumstance, they fought for this country. That they died for it is the price they paid so that their chosen countryman could live in the freedom they protected.

4. And they fought and died despite some shortcomings.

African-Americans were enslaved for more than two centuries and have faced varying degrees of discrimination in the 150-plus years since emancipation. And yet the cemeteries are filled with those who wore the American flag on their uniform.

Hispanics, many of whose relatives didn’t speak English and have been derided for that, died for this country. Asian-Americans, who faced exclusion and taunts and – for some – even internment, died for this country.

Jews and Muslims died for this country despite proclamations by many politicians that this is a Christian nation. Those Muslims fought for this country even as some said they were one with the enemy.

Gays – many of whom were forced to deny their identity so that they could, in fact, fight for this country – died for this country.

And I’m going to throw in my fellow Italian-Americans. Faced with discrimination, taunting and insinuations that they were all Mafioso, they fought and died for this country.

When some blowhards talk about making American great again, they insult the idea that these people didn’t already make America great. That these people, and all the other Americans who gave their lives from Lexington to Kabul, weren’t part of something that gets greater and greater as each day passes.

Other nations can claim that those who fought for them are a varied bunch. No nation can claim it with the force and conviction that our nation can. That so many of them – at best guess, about 1.4 million of them – have died to make us the most vaunted nation in the world is the reason today is so very special.

1. It’s Wednesday, May 25, 2016.

2. It’s currently 87 degrees here in the suburbs north of New York. I’m lovin’ it. Been waiting for a day like this for months.

3. I can’t imagine being Matt Harvey today.

A little more than six months ago, 44,000-plus Mets fans almost brought down Citi Field beseeching manager Terry Collins to let Harvey pitch the ninth inning against Kansas City. He had thrown eight scoreless innings, and looked like the hero Mets fans needed to get the team to Game Six of the World Series.

Collins ignored his instinct and went with the sentiment in the ballpark. It didn’t work. The Royals tied the game in the ninth, won it a few innings later and claimed their world championship.

Harvey hasn’t looked so good since. He has lost three of his first 10 decisions this season and not looked good in the process. After getting shelled by Washington last week in New York, he was booed off the field. Last night, he pitched three OK innings before the Nationals socked three homers in the next two innings.

The tabloid backpages are merciless. So are the bandwagon fans who just got to Flushing after all those years in the Bronx.

But the Mets aren’t giving up, and I like that idea. This is a young man who, when he’s right, is one of the toughest pitchers in baseball.

Something’s not right, and sending him to the minors or to the bullpen won’t bring his confidence or ability back. He’s still in the recovery stage from Tommy John surgery, and maybe his problems stem from that.

If he’s hurt, then by all means sit him down. Let him recover. But if he’s not, he’s got to pitch his way out of it. And real Mets fans, like the good folks at the 7 Line Army, will be patient. The Mets are going to have a hard time getting back to the World Series without Matt Harvey, so let’s give him a chance to straighten himself out.

4. The battle between him and her is on.

Yes, the him is Donald Trump. No, the her isn’t Hillary Clinton.

It’s Elizabeth Warren, the senior senator from Massachusetts.

Truth be told, Warren is the real darling of the left side of the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders ran for President because she didn’t.

She was front-and-center during the financial crisis, trying to figure out who did what and coming up with ways to make sure it didn’t happen again. She came up with the idea of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency aimed at helping consumers cope with complications and trickery involving their money.

Warren hasn’t endorsed anyone in the Democratic race. But if this week makes anything clear, it’s that she is driven to make sure Hillary Clinton is the next President – if only to make certain that Trump isn’t.

Since Trump since became the presumptive Republican nominee earlier this month, Warren has been dueling him with his weapon of choice: Twitter. The two have engaged in protracted tweet wars, with Warren blasting Trump for his positions on financial reform and income inequality.

Last night, Warren delivered a speech to the Center for Popular Democracy that hit hard at Trump’s statements, including one in which he bragged about making money in the financial crisis. Watch here.

Trump, for his part, has shown his irritation by calling Warren “Pocahontas.” That’s in reference to the “scandal” Republicans uncovered that the senator has said she has some Cherokee blood. Of course, there’s no indication she received any favoritism in hiring because of this. And, of course, the real Pocahontas wasn’t a Cherokee, so Trump’s understanding of people who aren’t from Queens remains muddy.

5. This may just be a taste of what Trump faces as the most despicable presidential nominee in American history.

President Obama warmed up for him at Rutgers last week, and there are others who could deliver body blows (right now, for instance, I’m listening to a song by Bruce Springsteen. Just a hint, Bruce).

Will they work? Well, Warren definitely did get under Trump’s skin this week. And the Pocahontas retort is going to get tired fast.

One thing is certain. Those who find Trump and his supporters a sickness of American life can’t do nothing. We can’t be the Germans or Italians who stood by and didn’t think it was important to stop Hitler and Mussolini.

Give him hell, Liz!

1. It’s Tuesday, May 24, 2016.

2. It’s my amazingly talented and hard-working daughter’s 25th birthday. May 24, 1991 is one of the happiest days of my life, and everything that’s happened in the quarter-century since reaffirms that.

3. It’s also the 75th birthday of Bob Dylan.

Now, Dylan isn’t one of my idols. If I wanted to listen to a single artist or group for an entire day, I’d listen to the Beatles or Bruce Springsteen.

But Dylan is interesting. I’m sure there’s someone better equipped than I to expound on his virtues and contribution to 20th century music. All I know is that there are a lot of really good songs on the Dylan playlist.

While I’m still trying to figure out exactly what “Tangled Up in Blue” is about, I love listening to it.

4. Bernie Sanders has his victory. The Democrats gave him five seats on the 15-member platform committee for the July convention. This gives him a say in how the party positions itself in the general election.

No, platforms ain’t what they used to be. The Republicans generally try to hide their platform because it usually contains some ideas too odious to sell to a national electorate; for example, their presidential candidates try to avoid the abortion plank because it’s likely to turn off a majority of women.

The Democrats aren’t much better at this. That said, getting the party to at least acknowledge your viewpoint on an issue is no small deal.

So the Sanders people can weigh in on the party’s position on income inequality and political contributions – the two issues on which the Vermont senator has staked his claim.

And if the wording is more Sandersian than it would have been, that’s how change comes.

5. I hope Sen. Sanders is happy about this. He’s not the party’s nominee. That’s Hillary Clinton. Now he has to come around, once the primaries end, to support her and advance his positions on these issues; no one should be saying that he needs to tone anything down on those matters.

The debate – if there’s any, and I’m not sure it’s that profound a difference – can come once the menace of Donald Trump is no longer a flicker of a possibility.

So, congratulations, Sen. Sanders! Try to accept your win gracefully.

1. It’s Wednesday, May 17, 2016.

2. There is little doubt that Bernie Sanders has been good for the 2016 campaign. His issues are real ones: income inequality, campaign finance reform and the sense that the economy doesn’t work for the lower and middle classes.

But at some point, the Vermont senator needs to decide which is better: either a) losing the battle and winning the war or b) trying too hard to win the battle, losing it anyway, and then losing the war as well.

Sanders won the Oregon primary last night. It was a fair-and-square win; he beat Hillary Clinton by 10 points in a contest only with Democrats participating. She won in Kentucky, but barely.

But Sanders indicated that he is not through fighting for the Democratic presidential nomination. And he believes that part of the reason he isn’t the presumptive nominee already – and Clinton is – is that the Democratic Party’s rules favor people who say they’re Democrats.

This might seem obvious. Most of Sanders’ wins have come in states where independents were allowed to vote in the Democratic primary. He believes that all of those voters are looking to make the same kind of changes that he advocates.

3. But, as last week’s West Virginia exit polls show, something smells a little off.

Sanders won the majority of voters who want a president less liberal than President Obama. That conflicts with the fact that Sanders is running somewhat to the left of the President. And it hints at the idea that many of the people voting for Sanders could be, in fact, trying to screw around with the Democratic race in order to help Donald Trump, who appears to have clinched the Republican nomination.

So Sanders can yell – and he does like to yell – a lot about how his supporters are trying to start a revolution. But being fractious with the party that he only embraced for the purpose of this presidential run is no way to get anything he wants.

4. Because if he fails to accept the inevitability of Hillary Clinton as the nominee, creating problems for her general election run and making President Trump a reality, he and his supporters will NEVER be forgiven by the people usually most sympathetic to their ideas.

They will never have the support of Hispanics and African-Americans who are worried about the bubbling of what has been latent racism. Women will never forgive the further erosion of their rights. The economic hardship a Trump presidency will cause – I second Mark Cuban’s remarks about the calamity awaiting stocks – will be blamed on Sanders.

He could instead be a team player. Support Clinton enthusiastically with the understanding that the things he’s advocating become priorities in her administration. Make certain that Trump doesn’t get a sniff of the White House.

5. There is precedent.

In 2008, one of Hillary Clinton’s points of contention was that Barack Obama wasn’t sufficiently committed to the cause of health care reform. That was considered a key difference between them.

But she stepped aside when the math was against her, as it is with Sanders.

Now, eight years later, Hillary Clinton is running for President to try to defend a health care reform law that has reduced the percentage of Americans uninsured to single digits. It’s called Obamacare. He did what she wanted.

6. Sanders shouldn’t drop out. His supporters in the remaining states, including the big prize of California, should have their say.

But by California, she will have enough delegates to be the presumptive nominee. And he then must embrace her and warn his followers that their plans for change will come to naught if Donald Trump becomes President.

Sanders can be the Hillary Clinton of the 2020s. Or he can be the Ralph Nader, whose intransigence helped give America eight years of George W. Bush. It’s his choice.

1. It’s Monday, May 16, 2016.

2. It was my privilege yesterday to attend the 250th anniversary commencement at Rutgers University.

First and foremost, it was a day of tremendous pride. My son, who completed his classes in December, came home from his teaching job in Seoul to attend his graduation. So no matter what transpired at the ceremony, attending was something my family was thrilled to do.

3. But the focus of the day – both at and away from the ceremony – was the commencement speaker. It was the President of the United States.

OK, for starters, there is no way it should be as crazy cold as it was on May 15, 2016 in Piscataway, N.J.

I’ll tell you how cold it was; I’ve been on college campuses with my kids for seven years now, and the only school uniform I’ve gleaned over that time is shorts and flip-flops.

I did not see one of the 10,000-plus graduates wearing shorts or flip-flops. It was too damn cold for that. The temperature was in the mid-50s and there was a steady 20-mile-an-hour wind. And then, in late morning, clouds moved in, so there was no sun to give even the illusion of warmth.

If you’ve attended a big college graduation in the past few years, you know that one of the features is the way hashtag messages to and from graduates flashing across the jumbotron scoreboard. One of them really resonated yesterday: a student hoping @POTUS brought the heat when he arrived.

4. @POTUS brought the heat.

One of the things that must drive Barack Obama’s detractors crazy is his self-assurance. There’s something – even in the way he walks – that gives you the sense of a man confident in his own abilities and in his view of the world. He seems unfazed by the adulation, of the awe. He understands it, but he doesn’t seem to be overwhelmed by it.

Yes, he had a receptive audience. The students, faculty, alumni and their families spent nearly three years lobbying President Obama to speak at the Rutgers commencement.

But when Obama began to speak, you could hear a pin drop in a stadium filled with 40,000-plus people. I’ve been in louder libraries.

He used the occasion to serve notice to Donald Trump and the Republican Party and they will not be running against Hillary Clinton alone.

He never used Trump’s name. Not once. But if you didn’t know who he was talking about, you’ve been asleep for awhile.

5. The first blow came a few minutes into the speech, shortly after he questioned the “death-defying” wisdom of Rutgers’ famous fat sandwiches that include mozzarella sticks and chicken fingers on cheese steak.

Talking about how the students were ready to take on the world, he said, “The world is more interconnected than ever before, and it’s becoming more connected every day. Building walls won’t change that.”

He was just warming up. He blasted Trump’s command of facts, saying “In politics and in life, ignorance is not a virtue.”

And he hammered at Trump’s “Make America great again” slogan, pointing out all the things about life that are far better than they were even 30 years ago. “When you hear someone longing for the good old days, take it with a grain of salt.”

Yes, it was a very political speech for a college commencement. If you haven’t been a supporter of the President, you might have been put off.

6. But if you wanted to hear a speech that wasn’t just platitudes and empty inspiration, you heard it.

Obama didn’t tell the graduates how great they were – he believed they already knew it. He told them ways they could use their greatness to change the world, and to not get frustrated or – the greatest sin in his mind – cynical.

The President delivered his message despite a gusty wind that keep shifting the hood symbolizing his honorary degree to his distraction. He delivered it despite an occasional shower that sent some folks scrambling for cover.

7. But if, as the tweet urged, the President brought the heat, the students and their families brought the warmth.

One reason Obama felt at home in Piscataway is that, as the first multi-racial President, he was addressed what he himself said might be the most diverse student body in the United States. If you want to see what America is becoming, look at Rutgers.

The coolest part of yesterday, to me, was watching the School of Arts and Sciences convocation. After a wonderful short speech by journalist Bill Moyers, the students paraded on stage to shake hands with the deans and get recognized. Their names and faces appeared on the video screens in the big stadium.

Watching these men and women makes you marvel at this country. Each student was different from the next – an African-American English major followed by a woman with an Arabic name and a hijab majoring in math followed by a kid with an Italian surname majoring in psychology. It just went on and on.

And the pride in their faces – and in the families dressed in their Sunday best watching in the bleachers – glowed as the sun finally burst through and the wind died down. It was as if the strength of their diversity was finally too much for elements – even more than the power of a confident commander-in-chief.

8. Among them was my son.

He has a father whose family came from Italy and a mother whose family came from China. He’s a world traveler, a teacher living and working in South Korea. He came back – 14,000 miles of flying in five days, and the miserable jet lag that ensues – because he realized that this was a great accomplishment, and that he has justifiable pride.

So do I.

1. It’s Wednesday, May 11, 2016.

2. Bernie Sanders took the West Virginia primary last night. But that wasn’t as shocking as some of the exit poll results.

The polls show that nearly 44% of the people who voted for Sanders would vote for Donald Trump in the fall, compared with 21% who would vote for Hillary Clinton.

The polls also show that Sanders won support among voters who want a president more liberal than Barack Obama. No surprise, there.

But he also won among voters who want a president less liberal than Obama. Clinton did better among voters who want to continue Obama’s policies.

There’s two things you can glean. One is that the voters in West Virginia are more than a little misinformed about this election. They don’t realize how far to the left Sanders is, and that while he and Trump are talking about big changes, Sanders has no use whatsoever for Trump.

The other thing, and the one that I think is more valid, is that Trump supporters screwed around with the Democratic primary.

This is why I oppose open primaries, such as West Virginia’s. With no Republican race left, voters inclined toward Trump can do more for their candidate by screwing around with the Democratic race.

And one way they can do that is to keep Sanders in the mix, forcing Clinton to divert some of her time to him instead of training her guns on Trump and the Republicans.

The Sanders people will say that he can win in November because he draws independents. But if he draws independents solely to mess up Hillary Clinton, it’s a phony argument. Open primaries allow for that kind of ratfucking, as the Watergate folks used to say.

I still believe Sanders should stay in the race. The Democrats who support him deserve the right to make their statement about the issues he has surfaced. He should go all the way to California and New Jersey next month.

But it should be people who have committed to the Democratic Party who get to say. When that happens, in most instances, Clinton wins.

This will be over after June 7, when Clinton will have the requisite delegates to claim the nomination, and any attempt to prolong the race beyond that date will only help Trump and the other horse’s asses in the Republican Party.

3. By the way, when I said yesterday that the two highest-paid hedge fund managers earned $3,234.40 a minute, I was figuring on them being at their job 24/7/365. 

Of course, they’re not. They sleep sometimes, I assume.

If you calculate what Ken Griffin and James Simons make in a nine-hour workday, assuming they take holidays, weekends and two-week vacations, you get $13,117.28 a minute. Or just over 4 minutes to make a teacher’s annual pay.

If that makes you feel better.

1. It’s Tuesday, May 10, 2016.

2. When Bernie Sanders rails about hedge funds, this is what he’s talking about:

Ken Griffin and James Simons, two men whose names are unknown to all but a few Americans, each made $1.7 billion last year, according to an annual survey by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine. 

That, folks, is $3,234.40 every minute. It took them about two hours and four minutes to earn the same amount of money President Obama is paid for running the United States.

What do they do? Griffin and Simons manage hedge funds. To varying degrees, they program computers that determine how to deliver a steady flow of income to the people who can afford to sock their money with them.

Their returns aren’t bad – Griffin made about 14% for his investors, while Simons earned about 16%.

Overall, according to Alpha, the top 25 hedge fund managers collectively made nearly $13 billion last year. And that wasn’t even the best year they ever had. In case you want to throw up, last year they only made about half what they did in 2009, when their pay stubs (Yeah. Right.) totaled $25 billion.

Some of the people on the list didn’t even make money for their investors last year, and they still got the big bucks.

3. There are two reasons this is perverted.

One, the average public school teacher earns $57,379 a year – what Griffin and Simons make in about 18 minutes. The highest paid doctor, a spinal surgeon, makes about $628,000 a year; Griffin and Simons have to toil a little more than three hours to match that.

And you can imagine other occupations that actually do something to help more than a few people. Griffin and Simons can match all the professions you can think of in 30 seconds in a trading day behind the screen.

Secondly, what can you do with $1.7 billion a year? I guess you can accumulate homes and art and cars and other gizmos.

But eventually, you find other uses. One of them is politics.

According to The New York Times, Griffin hasn’t spent his money well this year. He’s bet on Marco Rubio, Jeb! Bush and Scott Walker in the presidential race. For his sake, you gotta hope he’s better at picking investments.

Simons has had better luck. His money is on Hillary Clinton.

It doesn’t matter. In this instance, Sanders is right – the amount of money the people who have hedge funds can throw around in a presidential race is outright disgusting. They can counter those $27 donations Sanders touts in an eye blink.

Obviously, the idiotic Citizens United ruling doesn’t help. These guys can put whatever money they want into political action committees and there’s nothing to stop them.

It doesn’t change the equation that Griffin’s vote is equal to mine. Yet. But it does give Griffin the ability to spread his viewpoint a lot further than I can spread mine. I have this blog, and if you tell your friends, that’s my advertising. If Griffin had one, he could put a billboard on every interstate highway promoting it and provide free access to it in every hotel.

So I sympathize with Sanders and his view that this money is soiling politics.

4. But I also think it’s nuts to try to fight hedge fund money by not taking it.

It would be unilateral disarmament for Clinton not to take Simons’ money. She’d have nowhere near the ability to spread his message that the Republicans – and that includes Donald Trump, who you’ll notice is weaseling away from his self-funding promise – will have in the fall. They don’t seem bothered by this money, and they got the Citizens United ruling to back them up.

The solution is simple. Get a Democrat into the White House. Get a Democratic Senate – hell, get a Democratic Congress. And then get Supreme Court Justices who understand that money doesn’t equal speech.

I’m sure Ken Griffin and James Simons have their virtues. They probably donate tons of money to charities and love their kids.

If they have any. Who knows? These aren’t people who are accountable to you and me, and yet they made $1.7 billion last year.

5. President Obama is going to Hiroshima later this month. He’ll be the first sitting President to visit the Japanese city that was the target of the first atomic bomb.

Americans have been leery of the idea that any official in any administration visit Hiroshima, seeing it as a form of apology for what we did.

I don’t think Obama sees it that way. Yes, we take responsibility for what we did. But we did what we thought we had to do. Ultimately, horrific as the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, they saved lives by shortening the war. That was their goal.

I think the President is wise to face up to what we did. We can’t hide from it. And it’s horribly sad. But we’re not ashamed – Harry Truman and the American military did what it had to do.

The good news is that Obama goes in peace. That’s how things get better.

1. It’s Monday, May 9, 2016.

2. Hope all the moms had a terrific Mother’s Day. One of the best days of the year.

3. By my conservative estimate, I have watched Bartolo Colon’s home run more than 120 times. That includes 15 times just sitting at the Cheesecake Factory at brunch yesterday and seeing it on screens in the background.

If you want to watch it – and, unless you’re poor San Diego Padres pitcher James Shields who yielded this, you do – here it is: http://m.mets.mlb.com/nym/video/v671207583/must-c-classic-colon-launches-first-career-home-run/?affiliateId=clubMEGAMENU. In fact, in this clip, you get to see it eight times.

4. Not that I don’t want this jackass to lose all 50 states on Nov. 8. But wouldn’t Donald Trump be better off if he went on vacation for a while? That would be the best thing for his candidacy. Because every time he opens his mouth on some TV show, he sounds like the dolt he is.

If your retirement hinges on a nicely put together package of securities designed to take you deep into old age, Trump is your one-way ticket to working for the rest of your life.

His proposal to “negotiate,” as if he was trying to weasel out of one of his bankruptcies, is de facto crippling to the world’s economy.

Put it this way: You put $100 in the bank on New Year’s Day expecting to earn $2 in sure interest in a year. The bank has a 240-year history of delivering on its promises, so you’re feeling confident that, while the money isn’t growing rapidly, you’ll be better off than you were.

On New Year’s Eve, the bank’s wacky-looking new chief comes to you and says he doesn’t want to give you your $102. He wants to give you $100 back. Or $99.

The first thing you’re going to think is, hey, doofus, I trusted you to give me the extra $2 when I signed up for this deal.

Secondly, if I didn’t want to make money, I would have put the money under a mattress. Or given it to some other bank that keeps its word, like First Ayatollah or Vlad’s Vault.

Third, why should I ever invest money with a welsher like you?

The bank needs that money to grow. It won’t be doing much growing if people don’t trust it.

The U.S. economy relies on the idea that our money and our debt are the most trustworthy financial instruments in the world. Trump’s idea of renegotiating it sends a signal to the world that we can’t be trusted. 

That wouldn’t make America great again. That would make America as unreliable as any Third World country.

Frankly, we could all use a break from hearing this meatball open his mouth.

1. It’s Tuesday, May 3, 2016.

2. On this day 30 years ago, Ferdinand won the Kentucky Derby.

I know this because I watched it in the back of a gray limousine in lower Manhattan, en route to my wedding reception.

So the Ferdinand mention buries the lead. It was also on this day 30 years ago that I married the love of my life and lived happily ever after.

3. President Obama knocked ‘em dead, as they say in the comedy business, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner on Saturday.

We have no video of Lincoln, but he’s the only one I can imagine having the same sense of comic timing as this Hawaiian kid does. And, as good as he was on Saturday, he wasn’t nearly as funny as he was on the Jerry Seinfeld “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” segment.

4. One of Obama’s riffs focused on Hillary Clinton’s inability to reach younger voters, losing them overwhelmingly to a guy who’s older than she is. He joked about how awkward Clinton seems on Facebook.

“Hillary trying to appeal to young voters is a little bit like your relative who just signed up for Facebook,” the president said.

Then he mimicked how he thinks she sounds: “‘Dear America, did you get my poke? Is it appearing on your wall? I’m not sure I’m using this right. Love, Aunt Hillary.’”

For her part, Clinton laughed along wherever she was; she wasn’t at the event.

“@potus Nice job last night. Aunt Hillary approves. #WHCD -H,” she tweeted on Sunday, the “-H” indicating that she tweeted it herself.

5. This reprise of Saturday’s laughfest is my way to get to the point I’ve been trying to make ever since people started discussing who will be Hillary Clinton’s running mate.

She’s running against Donald Trump. There are not a lot of groups in the Democratic base with whom she’s going to need help.

But younger voters are one of them. There’s no way she’s going to improve her own standing with them unless she picks a running mate who can reach them.

And that’s why I like Sheryl Sandberg.

Those asking who she is are in my generation. Sandberg is the chief operating officer of Facebook. She is 46 years old and she turned Mark Zuckerberg’s idea into a money-making machine.

But Sandberg is no novice. She was chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers in the Clinton administration. She was an executive at Google in its early growth years before jumping over to Facebook.

6. What would Sheryl Sandberg bring to a Democratic ticket with Hillary Clinton?

— Relative youth. She’s more than 20 years younger than Clinton.

— An ability to reach younger voters. She’s in a different league than Clinton or anyone the Republicans can throw up against her. She understands technology and how younger people use it. And she knows the issues that affect them better than older politicians can. These are people that Trump and the Republicans have no idea how to talk to.

— Business acumen. Sandberg knows how to make money. Frankly, she’s better at it than Trump; companies she’s helped run have never sniffed the word “bankruptcy.” That will resonate with those who think the ability to handle economics is important.

— Doubling down on women. Sandberg is also known for her strong stance on women becoming leaders in the workplace. Her book “Lean In” was a manifesto for women’s rights and equality. Clinton gets an opportunity to play further to her strength in the campaign – and to Trump’s biggest weakness.

— A real change. Bernie Sanders supporters, you say you want a revolution? Sheryl Sandberg would be it.

What are the negatives?

— Does she want it? Sandberg is probably a pretty content billionaire in Silicon Valley. Why give that up for the mess that is Washington?

— Family considerations. That would normally be sexist to say. But Sandberg’s husband died suddenly last year, leaving her a widow with two children. If you think about the sudden death of Beau Biden affected his father, the vice president, you can imagine that Sandberg might be feeling the same sad pull. She would have to consider if she and her kids are ready for the stress of a national campaign.

— Dealing with Trump. The circumstances of her husband’s death, a treadmill accident at a Mexican resort, are probably not beyond the caustic touch of a creep like Donald Trump and others of his ilk. Would she be willing to endure that?

Hillary Clinton has about a month or so to determine her running mate. Sheryl Sandberg is not on any lists. Floating a trial balloon on Facebook might be a way for Aunt Hillary whether a Clinton-Sandberg ticket excites people.

I think it would.