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 Trump pieces by Isaac Chotiner and Josh Voorhees seemingly take dueling positions.
Versus:
But they’re ultimately complementary. What Voorhees is explaining is why individual May polls that find Trump close to or ahead of Hillary are not evidence that she’s likely to lose in November. What Chotiner is explaining is that it is insane that an incoherent fraud like Trump has even gotten close enough that this is a possibility—that he has locked down one of the two available major-party presidential nominations just by promising to humiliate everyone in sight who isn’t white:
He has shown that 45 percent of the voting public, give or take, is willing to elect someone who has spent the past year campaigning openly as a crass bigot who hates the women he’s not having sex with (and he probably hates them, too). He has proved that running as a white nationalist is not an immediate disqualifier for the presidency of the United States in 20–freaking–16.
We should “be scared, and cognizant of the moment, because it is an absolutely frightening one,” Chotiner writes. Is he wrong? He’s not wrong. I’m keeping the danger level at a robust 2.5 horsemen.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
