The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: A Weird Outbreak of Reasonable Behavior

President Obama speaking today at the Treasury Department in Washington, D.C.

Jim Lo Scalzo/Pool/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.

Yesterday, Donald Trump had the most publicly insane and disturbing day that any major-party presidential candidate has had in quite some time, calling to ban entire nations of people from immigrating to the United States and insinuating that both huge swaths of Muslim American communities and the current president are complicit in jihadist terror attacks.

Today, surprisingly, a number of members of said candidate’s party—who have, with some exceptions, been cravenly capitulating to and enabling his disgraceful behavior for months—appeared to have suddenly developed a conscience, or at least a self-preserving sense that things have gone too far. From a Politico piece called “Trump’s terror response has Republicans fretting anew”:

“Saying nothing would have been better,” said one member of the Republican National Committee. “Every Senate candidate will be forced to answer for Trump’s bizarre response [to the Orlando terror attack]. … His lack of empathy is jarring.”

More:

“[Trump] just blows up everything we want to do,” said a senior GOP lawmaker, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “Every time you turn around, he’s said something new. It’s impossible for us to keep up.”

Republican House leaders reiterated that they do not support Trump’s immigration-ban proposals. Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander went so far as to allude to the possibility that Trump would not be the GOP nominee:

And while it’s not shocking that President Obama would object to Trump’s proposals and the tenor of the candidate’s Monday comments, the president did go further today in condemning Trump than he ever has before, delivering a legitimately angry defense of American values that is worth your time to watch.

I feel a little better about being American today.

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