The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: “The Least Racist Person That You’ve Ever Encountered”

Donald Trump speaks during the Faith and Freedom Forum Coalition’s Road to Majority conference on Friday in Washington, D.C.

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

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 in the Wide World of Trump:

1. Republican National Committee senior adviser Sean Spicer claimed with a straight face that his party’s presumptive nominee “has made clear he was not trying to speak to [U.S. District Court Judge Gonzalo Curiel’s] heritage” when Trump, on multiple occasions over multiple days, clearly spoke about Curiel’s heritage. (Exhibit A: “He’s a Mexican,” the celebrity businessman said of the Indiana-born judge last week. “We’re building a wall between here and Mexico.”)

2. Trump told the Washington Post, presumably also with a straight face: “I am not a racist, in fact, I am the least racist person that you’ve ever encountered.” He then handed the reporter a new issue of a Don King–owned weekly newspaper that has endorsed Trump for president and Bernie Sanders for vice president. “Now, Don King knows racism probably better than anybody,” Trump said. “He’s not endorsing a racist, okay?”

3. Trump was the main attraction at the Road to Majority conference in Washington, D.C, which was the first big Republican event since he locked up the party’s nomination. His performance suggested that he still has a wee bit of work left to do to win over Christian conservatives.

4. Democrats of all stripes continued to learn just how fun it is to attack Trump.

All in all, it was rough day in a rough week for Donald Trump—one that also so happened to overlap with one of Hillary Clinton’s best weeks in months. The original watchman has barred underlings like me from dropping the danger level below one horseman for now, so I’ll leave it there. But, to be clear, that sole horseman you see on the horizon is totally racist.

Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons