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.
Today was Donald Trump’s first full day as the near-guaranteed Republican nominee for president. It was a busy day.
- He told the New York Times that his first 100 days in the White House would involve inviting Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell to Florida to eat lobsters, designing a wall to keep out Mexicans, invalidating the Affordable Care Act, and banning Muslims. He also claimed he doesn’t want to make the U.S. “unstable”—as if ripping health insurance away from millions of people, violating the First Amendment by banning an entire class of human beings from the country because of their religious beliefs, and feeding Mitch McConnell people food would be totally chill things that wouldn’t be disruptive at all.
- Trump also told MSNBC that his immediately disavowed March assertion that women should be punished for having abortions was an “academic answer” that he gave “rhetorically” to a “theoretical,” “rhetorical” question that was “just a question in theory” posed “theoretically.” Sure, that clears it up.
- John Kasich dropped out. No more Kasich. His campaign is no more. It has ceased to be. It is an ex-campaign.
- Bill O’Reilly quasi-defended Trump’s conspiracy-theory nonsense about Ted Cruz’s father in a very symbolic exchange on Fox News with conservative intellectual Charles Krauthammer.
That’s a lot of action. The nation’s attention is squarely fixated on Trump right now, for sure. But I have to say I agree with my colleague Josh Voorhees: When you consider the current state of the economy, the relative popularity of the Democratic incumbent, the current head-to-head polling, and Trump’s reputation with the general public, it’s still Hillary Clinton’s race to lose. I hope!
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
