The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: The Coveted Bobby Knight Nuclear Death Endorsement

Donald Trump in Indianapolis on April 27.

John Sommers II/Getty Images

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.

Not much doing with Trump today except for the uniformly bad reception his foreign-policy speech got, even from macho conservative outlets like the Wall Street Journal and the National Review. I also found a general election poll that put Hillary Clinton ahead of Trump by 11 points, slightly assuaging the panic I felt yesterday after seeing the George Washington poll that had him only trailing by 3 percent.

Trump also continued to campaign in Indiana with notoriously ill-tempered basketball coach Bobby Knight, who said today that one of the things he likes about Trump is that Trump would have no problem ordering the deployment of nuclear weapons.

Bobby Knight saying he appreciates how close Trump keeps his finger to the nuclear death button is probably not the kind of endorsement that is going to help convince independent voters that he has the demeanor and judgment they’re looking for in a president. Ironically, in fact, Knight’s statement (along with the lack of enthusiasm for Trump’s foreign-policy speech) has convinced me to lower today’s Apocalypse Watch danger level back down to two horsemen.

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