The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: Be Not Afraid

These are Donald’s odds of becoming president.

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The Trump Apocalypse Watch is a subjective daily estimate, using a scale of one to four horsemen, of how likely it is that Donald Trump will be elected president, thus triggering an apocalypse in which we all die.

If I could give Trump one hoof of one horse every day of Trump Apocalypse Watch, I would, that is how little chance he has of becoming president in my subjective eyes. As I am a mere substitute for TAW’s true and rightful author, though, I will try to go by what I imagine might be a proximity of his perhaps more objective subjective standards. Even by that imagined measure, I think Trump would have slipped significantly on Wednesday. Let’s look at the evidence:

  • First off, Trump fell considerably in the latest Marquette Law School poll of next week’s Wisconsin primary and now trails Ted Cruz by 10 points there. As Jim Newell explains, while he’s still the front-runner for the nomination, these numbers and other bad national favorability ones for Trump would seem to increase his odds of facing (and losing) a contested convention.
  • Point the second, Trump on Wednesday revealed more of how little he knows about how government works, saying he would appoint a Supreme Court justice who would investigate Hillary Clinton’s email scandal. Huh? This sort of complete lack of basic understanding of our system of governance probably won’t hurt Trump in a Republican primary among his core supporters, but general election voters might want a candidate who understands what the high court does.
  • Numero trois: Trump backed out of his loyalty pledge not to run as a third-party candidate late on Tuesday. While that may seem like good news for Trump’s chances—he could always win as an independent if he’s denied the nomination, right?—it seems to me like a premature exercise of leverage he might want to use in a contested convention, one that could push the party away from him further.
  • Finally, he said on Wednesday that he wants to punish women who get abortions, articulating something that most pro-life politicians know to avoid saying because it will terrify women and a lot of men. John Kasich, who is very conservative on these and most topics, was already attacking Trump for those comments on Wednesday. In any general election, if Trump makes it that far, you can be sure that they would appear in a Hillary Clinton ad that would likely do serious damage to his chances of becoming president and bringing us all doom.

Trump goes down to half a horseman. 

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons