The most reviled person in America demonstrated both balls and the existence of hidden offshore bank accounts when he dropped $5 million on a Super Bowl ad in which he announced his candidacy for President.
“You want a leader who can stand up to Washington?” said the smarmy sociopath in the ad. “C’mon. I just spent two hours giving Congress the middle finger to its face. Literally. I make Trump look like an amateur.”
Shkreli came to the public’s attention last year for notoriously hiking the price of a long-established drug by five thousand percent “because.” Since then he’s stayed in the limelight for first offering a half-hearted promise to lower the price, then reneging on that promise, then getting indicted for fraud, then blowing $2 million on a Wu Tang Clan album.
“He’s like a living click-bait generator,” grinned Carmine Frankowski, politics editor at BuzzFeed. “It’s marvelous. He keeps topping himself with new feats of dickery. The only thing this story doesn’t have is a hot girlfriend, maybe a porn star or something, you know, a hot ass we can put up next to Shkreli’s punchable face. Then the story would achieve maximum internet gravity.”
Shkreli’s announcement came as a surprise to everyone, not least because the entirety of his campaign organization seems to consist of the Super Bowl ad. Nonetheless, he immediately rocketed up in the polls past every Republican candidate and is projected to win New Hampshire by 30 points, despite not actually being on the ballot.
Democratic hopefuls Clinton and Sanders declined to comment on Shkreli’s candidacy, though Sanders offered to “punch the putz in the face” as a public service.
“On the one hand, he doesn’t have any policy positions, other than just being a dick,” said statistician Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com. “On the other hand, that’s sort of become the main qualification for being a Republican candidate this election cycle.”