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.
Donald Trump had a slow news day on Monday, which I guess is good for those of us who want to try to avoid a nuclear winter? It means he didn’t cause any more harm to his tanking campaign, but it also means he didn’t undo any of the damage that weeks of verbal meltdowns have done to his presidential chances.
Trump’s start to the week included a policy speech in which he called for “extreme vetting” of immigrants and an ideological test for immigrants to be allowed into this country. The Democratic response was largely ridicule, with Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid calling on Trump to have to take the naturalization test. As Slate’s Josh Voorhees pointed out, Trump also used the occasion to repeat a favorite falsehood: That neighbors saw bombs at the home of the San Bernardino attackers before that assault but refused to report them because of political correctness. This lying and immigrant baiting only reinforces Trump’s well-established brand as a lying immigrant baiter, which seems like—while a successful strategy in the GOP primary—it is not going so great in the general election.
In the past few days, Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight has slowly ticked up his projected odds of Hillary Clinton of winning the presidency to near 90 percent, the highest it’s ever been. For perspective, in 2012 Obama’s odds of winning the presidency didn’t reach above Clinton’s current mark until the day before the election. On this day in 2012, Silver put Obama’s chances of earning re-election at 68.7 percent. He ultimately won by about four points and with a landslide 332 electoral votes.
As Silver noted, Trump is also facing the possibility that the Republican National Committee could cut off its funding for his campaign in October. “What would keep me up late at night if I were Trump? I might not be sleeping at all,” Silver writes. “The tactics that helped me to win the primary don’t seem to be working in the general election. My position in the polls is deteriorating from middling to dire. Most acutely, I’d worry about getting cut off by the Republican National Committee or thrown under the bus by down-ballot Republican candidates who are rightly concerned about their own survival.”
All things considered, the threat level remains at half a horseman.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
