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.
Donald Trump has discovered something terrible about the judge who’s handling one of the Trump University fraud cases. This judge was born in Indiana in 1953, but apparently his parents came to the United States from Mexico. Can you imagine? An American whose parents were not themselves born in America? It boggles the mind, and Trump has declared that the Mexico connection is the reason that the case has thusfar gone poorly for him even though the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was involved in it since well before anything that Trump said about Mexico/rape/walls became national news. (Also, needless to say, the actual case itself doesn’t have anything to do with Mexico.)
What Trump is saying is nationalist racist nonsense, and even Paul Ryan is embarrassed by it. I would say that it’s broadly off-putting enough that we could lower the Apocalypse Watch danger level even further if it weren’t for the violence—some of it provoked by protesters rather than Trump supporters—that broke out outside a San Jose Trump rally last night. There’s an argument to be made that violent protests outside his events don’t necessarily help Trump, but the Apocalypse Watch is a subjective exercise, and subjectively it’s disappointing and disturbing to see political mob harrassment becoming more common in the United States. On balance, then, we’ll keep the danger level at one horseman.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
