The Slatest

Today’s Trump Apocalypse Watch: Defections and Nuclear War

From a Trump rally in Ashburn, Virginia on Tuesday.

Alex Wong/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.

The premise of the running Slate feature that you are currently reading is the slightly facetious notion that a Donald Trump presidency would cause the extinction of all life on earth. Said premise became less facetious this morning when MSNBC host Joe Scarborough asserted that Trump repeatedly asked one of his foreign policy advisers why the U.S. doesn’t use its nuclear weapons more often. Scarborough:

Several months ago, a foreign policy expert on the international level went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked, at one point, “If we have them, why can’t we use them?” That’s one of the reasons he just doesn’t have foreign policy experts around him.

Troubling, especially when combined with Trump’s mind-boggling lack of current-events knowledge—last night on Bill O’Reilly’s show, the GOP candidate suggested that the U.S. and Russia collaborate to strike ISIS, which has already been happening since November 2015. Elsewhere, a Trump spokeswoman blamed Barack Obama for the 2004 death of Army captain Humayun Khan; at the time, Obama was an Illinois state senator. And big-time Republican donor Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, announced that she will be both voting and raising money for Hillary Clinton.

Republican establishment figures are apparently plotting an “intervention” to get Trump to stop wasting his campaign resources on petty feuds. Meanwhile, this afternoon, Trump is at a rally in Florida where he has apparently gone off on a long tangent about how the media has falsely accused him of mocking disabled New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski in a speech last fall. There’s still a lot of time before November; it wouldn’t be unprecedented if Trump were able to turn things around. But first he’s got to want to turn things around.

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