The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: Salad Days for White Supremacy

Once, twice, three times a lady who is not voting for Trump.

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.

A lot going on with Trump today, guys. A lot going on with Trump. First, there’s the burgeoning meme, based on a few comments he’s made in recent days, that Trump is becoming more moderate or even trying to run to Hillary Clinton’s left. Slate’s Isaac Chotiner and Jamelle Bouie have conducted a devastating twin-pronged attack on that notion; Chotiner takes apart the idea that Trump’s vague statements about the minimum wage and taxes are anything but the offhand mumblings of someone whose positions on those issues are in fact very conservative, while Bouie observes that the true core of Trump’s campaign is—and will remain—his reactionary and not-at-all-leftist racist nationalism. As if to prove Bouie’s point, it emerged this afternoon that the Trump campaign has nominated a prominent, vocal white supremacist to be one of its national convention delegates. (The campaign blames this on a “database error.”)

In D.C., meanwhile, many white hands are being wrung by congressional Republicans who can’t decide whether they are ready to acquiesce to the preferences of GOP voters—who seem to be uniting behind Trump, per recent polls—and the majority of their colleagues by getting behind the Trump campaign. The significant downside to doing so is that they may end up completely sabotaging their reputations for the rest of their lives, but on the other hand they want to be re-elected! It’s a conundrum. Paul Ryan is among those who are dithering—earnest public dithering is kind of his thing—but Jim Newell thinks Ryan will be endorsing Trump soon enough if he hears the right conservative platitudes. Someone who won’t ever, never, never be doing so is Nebraska Sen. Ben Sasse, who has literally been declaring in public that he feels sad about Trump when he walks down to the river to think. Given the total impossibility of winning the electoral college by running against the Republican nominee from his right, though, it’s unlikely that Sasse is going to be doing much between now and November besides thinking.

Where does this leave us? Mostly in the same place we already were: Knowing that Trump is a candidate who’s disliked by a ton of people but will still get significant support in his campaign from GOP voters and politicians. Still, I’ll admit I was surprised by the recent polls showing Trump and Clinton neck and neck in some key swing states, so I’m going to raise the Apocalypse Watch danger level—though only by a half of a horse, because candidates who win general elections in the U.S. don’t generally nominate vocal white supremacists to be their convention delegates.

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