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.
It was actually a fairly quiet weekend for Trump material, all things considered; Ben Carson claimed Sarah Palin is being considered as Trump’s running mate, but I will believe that when I see it. The New York Times printed a big piece summarizing Trump’s history of leering behavior with women, but it didn’t break much new ground—and Trump, as might be expected, used it as just another occasion to score points by bashing the media. More consequential in the bigger picture, perhaps, was an attack against conservative pundit Bill Kristol published on the right-wing Breitbart site whose headline identified Kristol as a “renegade Jew” and which criticized him for being part of a “small but well-heeled group of Washington insiders” working against Trump—a conspiratorial cabal, if you will. The piece, while authored by a Jewish writer, played quite nakedly to anti-Semitic stereotypes that already have currency among Trump’s many white-supremacist fans; as Slate’s Michelle Goldberg writes, Breitbart’s framing of the story was “a signal to the sewers,” and while it might not make Trump more likely to get elected, the fact that the Republican nominee is helping shepherd anti-Semitism into the mainstream raises this election’s already-high stakes even higher. We’ll set the Apocalypse Watch danger level to two horsemen.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
