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.
Here’s an observation I just came up with by myself, definitively becoming the first person to observe it: The only certainties in this life are death and taxes. And on that front, today’s Trump news may not have involved much death aside from the implicit threat of mass extinction that is inherent in any discussion of his candidacy, but it did involve a heaping load o’ discussion about top marginal rates. To wit:
- It’s been reported that Trump has hired two notorious trickle-down economists to rework his absurd tax plan. Whatever they come up with is definitely still going to involve huge tax cuts for the rich.
- Trump says he’s decided he won’t be releasing his tax returns. That might be because they would reveal (among other things) how little he pays in taxes.
- Hillary Clinton has started attacking Trump for pushing an economic plan “written by a billionaire for billionaires.” Apparently Clinton’s focus groups have found that undecided voters don’t realize that her general-election opponent’s proposals are very kind to the top 1 percent.
What does it all mean? It means that, as usual, a Republican candidate who does want to cut taxes for rich people has succeeded in convincing a meaningful slice of the population that he does not want to cut taxes for rich people. (Perhaps the only certainties in life are death, taxes, and the Republican nominee being slippery about the latter.) But it also means that Hillary Clinton is going to try to spend six months changing that perception. Our danger level stays unmoved at 1.5 horsemen.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
