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’s week started off so promising. Hillary Clinton had to cancel a West Coast trip and take off the first half of the week from fundraising and campaigning because of her pneumonia diagnosis. This came on the heels of the very bad-looking footage of her struggling to get into a van, an incident which was later attributed to dehydration and the pneumonia. That was preceded by Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark, for which she continued to be hammered all week despite her general not wrongness on the subject. Whether it was all this or a confluence of other factors, Hillary’s woes were reflected in rising poll numbers for Trump. This is the week that he closed the gap with Clinton to under 2 points. This is the week that TAW reached three and a half horsemen.
Trump being Trump, it couldn’t last. A very good cycle of news and disciplined messaging for Trump has given way to a return to a more standard routine of controversy. To wit:
- Trump picked a fight with a pastor at a black church in Flint, Michigan.
- Trump’s tax returns came back as an issue after his son said he wasn’t releasing them for political motives and not because of his stated justification that he can’t because he’s being audited, which has no basis in reality.
- The Trump Foundation appears to have done many, many shady things and is being investigated for it by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
- Michelle Obama absolutely destroyed him during an event for Hillary Clinton, showing why she might be the most effective surrogate of this campaign season for either campaign.
Finally, the week ended with Trump being forced to acknowledge for the first time that the biggest conspiracy theory and lie that he’s ever propagated—the one that fueled his national rise to prominence—was, in fact, false. Trump’s renunciation of his birther past—and his new fiction that it was Hillary Clinton, and not himself, who pushed it out into the world—came in the form of a disgraceful and epic troll of the media that is sure to piss off more than a few of its members.
Not only was this a reminder of Trump’s years of spreading the lie that Barack Obama might have been born in another country and was thus ineligible to be president, it was also a slap in the face to anyone who wanted him to answer for that lie. Trump’s campaign staff had convinced the media that he would be answering questions about his birther history—which continued years after the time Trump now claims he “ended” the controversy by forcing Obama to publicize his birth certificate—and instead he locked them in the ballroom and tricked them into essentially airing a free commercial for him. This has led to a soul-searching call from the Washington Post for the media to stop playing the part of Trump’s stooge, and enough reporters and producers might be angry enough to finally listen. Whether they do or not, a day spent talking about birtherism is a good day for Hillary and a bad day for Donald.
We remain at a low-level one horseman.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
