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.
Most (well, all) Slate writers agreed that Donald Trump’s reaction to the massacre in Orlando was abhorrent. It remained an open question, though, whether the general public would agree with us. Today, we got the beginning of that answer in the form of a poll whose results were not good at all for the Trump campaign. From Slate’s Josh Voorhees:
Consider a new CBS News poll out Wednesday, which asked Americans how they felt about Trump, Clinton, and President Obama’s respective responses to the Orlando attack, which was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history: 44 percent of Americans approved of Obama’s response, while 34 percent disapproved (net: plus-10); 36 percent approved of Clinton’s response, while 34 percent disapproved (net: plus-2); and 25 percent approved of Trump’s response, while 51 percent disapproved (net: minus-26).
Those numbers, in addition to general-election polls that show the gap between Hillary Clinton and Trump widening despite her own high unfavorable numbers, seem to indicate that Trump’s fade is less about Clinton surging and more about Trump losing support as he continues to prioritize rhetoric that might appeal to his hardline supporters but is offputting to everyone else (e.g. insisting that President Obama really does support terrorist attacks against American citizens). That’s particularly bad news for Trump because, per the conventional wisdom and common sense, Clinton’s unfavorable numbers will probably fall in coming weeks as Bernie Sanders supporters come aboard her bandwagon.
We are teetering on the brink of moving the danger level down to half a horseman. Teetering, people. But without any sign of a concerted effort to make someone besides Trump the Republican nominee, we’ll leave it at one.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
