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.
There are two Trump-related things today that worry me.
One is that Politico reported on his plans to make the Republican National Convention more exciting by treating it as a four-day reality/infomercial event at which, for example, he’ll dramatically unveil his running mate and maybe his potential Cabinet. This is, as Josh Voorhees wrote, a very good idea. Conventions have been getting more boring and less dramatic for years, and Trump’s version of one is likely to be much more popular than Hillary Clinton’s. It’s going to be four days of free advertising that he gets to completely control without anyone interrupting him when he says something dishonest.
The other bad thing that happened is that Trump released a list of potential Supreme Court nominees that appears specifically crafted to get conservative true-believers excited. It’s a move that seems likely to mollify ideologically-motivated Republican Trump holdouts while still being so obscure in the big picture that it doesn’t turn off undecided voters.
Dammit.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
