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.
HuffPo’s Ariel Edwards-Levy makes an observation about Google searches that tracks with the conventional wisdom about how the last two months of campaigning have gone:
Basically, when people are thinking about Donald Trump, they’re thinking it might not be a great idea to vote for him. But when he fades out of the headlines and keeps his mouth shut—and when Hillary Clinton makes news and people start Googling her—America’s polarized blue-red split seems to start reasserting itself and polls drift closer to being tied. After the first presidential debate, Slate’s Isaac Chotiner suggested that Trump might genuinely want to skip the next two. But what if he stopped doing anything? Trump can’t just openly give up, because he’d look like a loser. But scaling back as many appearances as possible to avoid creating video-clip fodder for negative ads, pulling surrogates off TV to give them less time to embarrass him, making fewer off-the-cuff comments that end up making people feel sympathetic to Hillary; tweeting less—what’s the downside? I mean, the downside is that Donald Trump likes to talk and this would mean he had to stop talking. But other than that, it would be a good plan.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
