The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: Area Lunatic Becomes Major-Party Presidential Nominee

Donald Trump at St. Anselm College in New Hampshire earlier today.

Timothy A. Clary/AFP/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.

This weekend’s terror attack in Orlando has, as everyone unfortunately probably suspected would happen, brought Donald Trump’s hysterical anti-immigrant paranoia back to the forefront of the national conversation. (This, of course, despite the perpetrator of the Sunday attack having been born—like Donald Trump—in Queens.) What even seasoned Trump observers might not have expected is that Trump would use the attack—which, in addition to having been carried out by an American, seems to have been planned mostly in isolation—to quasi-accuse our current president of being some sort of Muslim sleeper agent in a jihadist conspiracy

The news has been so crazy and unsettling since the Pulse nightclub incident that this accusation is almost getting lost, but let’s just repeat it here: The Republican Party’s 2016 nominee has implied that the president may be a Muslim agent who is conspiring in the murders of American citizens.

We’ll keep the horse danger level stable until we see how Trump’s paranoid rambling plays in the polls, but, for what it’s worth, I think his speech today was limp and uncompelling and I think that calling the current, reasonably popular president a saboteur is not going to help Trump win voters who are already skeptical that he has the right temperament for the White House.

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