The Slatest

Today Trump Apocalypse Watch: Trump Will Protect Us From Canada

A protester outside a Donald Trump rally in Lynden, Washington, on Saturday.

Matt Mills McKnight/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.

Today’s top-line Trump story is his feud with Paul Ryan; in short, Trump is mad that the Speaker of the House has been ambivalent about endorsing him and threatened on Sunday to try and remove Ryan from his position as chairman of the July GOP convention. It would apparently be difficult to force Ryan out of his convention role involuntarily, but the Speaker is now trying to deescalate the situation by claiming that he’d be happy to let Trump pick someone else to chair the gathering. This is a dumb feud over semantics and symbolism, but one that is relevant for our purposes in that it demonstrates that Trump is still going full speed ahead with his “constantly being a prick” strategy rather than trying to reach out more quietly to the party leaders whose support he would benefit from. Meanwhile, the Houston Chronicle reports that Trump seems to be triggering a surge in Latino voter registration and the New Republic reports that the Trump campaign’s new finance chief owned a company that foreclosed fraudulently on a bunch of homeowners during the housing crisis. In other words, it doesn’t seem like Mr. Trump became more likely to win the general election today.

Also, the protester above made a funny sign. Canada! That’s funny!

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