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.
Candidates have bad days: The day when Mitt Romney’s 47 percent comments leaked; the day that Barack Obama made his comment about white working-class voters who “cling to guns and religion;” whatever day it was that John McCain fully realized the horror he had unleashed by choosing Sarah Palin as his running mate. But no candidate in modern presidential history can likely match Donald Trump’s Oct. 3 for its sheer volume of unflattering news:
- It’s the first weekday since the New York Times revealed he claimed to have lost a billion dollars in 1995 and as a result may not have paid federal income taxes for up to 18 years.*
- The Associated Press published an extensively reported story about Trump repeatedly sexually harassing women on the set of the Apprentice.
- Appearing at an event hosted by a veterans’ political action committee, Trump suggested that service members who take their own lives aren’t “strong” enough to “handle” trauma.
- The New York attorney general’s office ordered the Trump Foundation to stop fundraising because, to put it bluntly, it doesn’t appear to follow any of the laws that charities are supposed to follow or do any of the stuff charities are supposed to do.
Hillary Clinton had been surging in the polls before this stuff happened. Our danger level is going down.
Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Getty Images, Wikimedia Commons
*Correction, Oct. 4: This post originally stated that Donald Trump may have avoided paying federal income taxes for the last 18 years. Trump in fact may have avoided paying such taxes for 18 years total, including some both before and after 1995.
