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
The two most high-profile events of RNC Day 3 were:
- Ted Cruz (melo)dramatically refusing to endorse Trump even while delegates got really really mad at him, and
- The New York Times publishing a Trump interview in which Trump suggested that he might not defend the Baltic NATO countries from a Russian invasion as president if he decides they haven’t been paying us enough.
Reasonable people may differ on whether the Cruz fiasco will cost Trump anything in the polls, but the NATO statement seems like a pretty bad unforced error, and one that ties in with the increasingly plausible notion that Trump, as president, would be a Putin stooge. Maybe there’s been an isolationist paradigm shift in American politics that the rest of us haven’t caught on to yet, but until proven otherwise I’m assuming that “being weaker than Russia” isn’t a winning electoral position and keeping our danger level low.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
