Quite a lot of historical misses occurred on April 25.
Joe Biden chose today, April 25, 2023, to release a canned video announcing his campaign for reelection. This symbolic choice joins a line of similar historical events:
April 25, 1599: Oliver Cromwell is born. After urging the beheading of King Charles I, Cromwell became Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland, and Ireland, the one and only effort at republican government in British history, established after brutally repressing the Irish. It was a failure, the monarchy was restored under Charles II less than two years after Cromwell’s death, and is still in place under Charles III.
April 25, 1915: The Entente landing at Gallipoli, celebrated today as ANZAC Day. The allied forces, led by the vanguard of Australian and New Zealand troops, conducted an amphibious landing in Turkey that went disastrously awry, becoming a watchword for military hubris and failure ever since. Winston Churchill, the political mind behind the failed campaign, which cost the lives of over 56,000 men to no military effect, was sacked from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty and soon left the Cabinet for the trenches in France.
April 25, 1925: Paul von Hindenburg completes his first campaign for president of Germany; he would be elected in the runoff the following day. The 77-year-old Hindenburg, born in the Forties of the prior century, would serve into a second term that he sought at age 84. Increasingly enfeebled by age, he was unable to resist the radicals within his own government, and ultimately signed away the German republic to the Nazis.
April 25, 1967: Colorado becomes the first state to legalize elective abortion.
April 25, 1980: The Desert One operation to rescue the hostages in Iran fails miserably with an air collision that killed eight American servicemen in the Iranian desert. The mission cemented Jimmy Carter’s reputation for failure and helplessness, and inspired Joe Biden in 2011 to advise Barack Obama against the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
April 25, 1993: A referendum in Russia chooses Boris Yeltsin — already the president of the Russian Federation, but now with the legitimacy of a democratic vote — to lead Russia’s new democracy. Republican government in Russia would not survive Yeltsin’s rule, which was hamstrung by his increasing incapacity to perform the job (due to his alcoholism), and he ended up handpicking security chief Vladimir Putin as his successor. Yeltsin’s funeral was held on April 25, 2007, which Putin declared to be a national day of mourning.
April 25, 2019: Biden announces his third campaign for president.
April 25, 2022: Twitter announces that it had agreed to sell the social-media platform to Elon Musk. Well, at least one thing on this list may yet end up working out well.