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Notes -
In concert with the other top-level discussions of betting, how about a topic which will definitely be uncontroversial:
Will Trump survive his full term?
No, I’m not talking about assassination. Curve-fitting the 4/45 former Presidents killed in office, the 4/59 terms ended by assassins, or the 4/236 years with assassinations? That’s a fool’s errand. It’s time for actuarial tables.
The President is 78 years and 7 months old. This gives a baseline 5-6% chance of death for the year, climbing towards 8% when he leaves office. He’d have a cumulative chance of death, during that period, of about 24%.
But Trump is not in the same position as the average American. He’s overweight or slightly obese, giving him a higher share of the risk for heart disease and stroke. He’s not a smoker, reducing various cardiovascular and cancer risk factors. He doesn’t drink, which further reduces his cancer and stroke risk but somehow raises his overall risk. Some of these factors, like cancer, are going to be mitigated by the planet’s best medical care. (You’d better believe that Trump is getting the best colonoscopy. The biggest.) Others are harder to screen or treat. I have no idea how to assess them holistically, and further data are welcome.
Still. 24% chance that this Presidency ends with conspiracy theories about stroke guns.
Watch this video of Trump powering through a round of Golf (and I do mean POWERING) and tell me you think this is a guy with failing health for his age:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=6Rb9b8rYhII?si=rFfmT-27t6uw2Mk1
Okay, don't watch the whole thing, it is an hour long, but skip to any random segment and see if it looks like he's having any physical difficulties.
I'd take the other side of any bet of Trump dying of natural causes in four years.
Yes he might experience a sharp decline, but the medical care on tap should stave off almost any plausible cause of death past his term.
In contrast, watch this video of Trump sound like a lunatic or of this video where he talks about "itchy" heaters. He's clearly suffered a pretty significant mental decline since 2016.
even taken out of the context of question or earlier part of this answer, he's explaining why he prefers gas heaters to electric ones which cause you to "itch" if you're sitting close to them, especially if they're radiating against naked skin
how is this evidence of mental decline at all? I can find a similar sort of clip from 2016-2020 and neither example is evidence of anything mentally deficient at all
It's his declining ability to make a coherent point. Age-related declines often exacerbate existing deficiencies, like what we've seen with Biden. Trump has always rambled and gone off script, but he used to at least be understandable without reading the tea leaves to understand what he means by "the Biden circles".
For further evidence, watch his debate performances in the 2016 primary, then watch his debate against Harris in 2024 right after. The dude has lost more than a decent step.
He is making a coherent point. The guy he's criticizing is pushing electric appliances while working to make electric more expensive and also those electric appliances are worse compared to their gas counterparts all in the context of a world where we're going to need vastly more electricity.
He is understandable. His rambling answer is coherent. This rambling statement is more coherent than half of current sitting US Senators could manage in recent confirmation hearings or in the face of even basic hostile questions from media. You can watch hours of Trump answering questions about all sorts of topics from hostile media in coherent ways.
edit: Talking about mental decline or health and speaking about Trump and Biden in the same category is just ridiculous. Biden was mentally deficient in 2020. He wasn't losing a step from 2016, he was already falling down the cliff. Biden rarely did any statements, even more rarely answered any questions from media, and when he did he had preplanned questions and answers written out on printouts for him to read off of to specific media people. Biden looked like he was focusing all of his mental energy on picking his feet up when walking so he didn't do the dementia shuffle.
In comparison to Trump, he's answered more questions total (and not preplanned screened ones) in his first week than Biden answered fake questions in his entire administration. Taking these sorts of comments and their intended implications from people, and I don't know if you were one, who were making excuses and covering for Joe Biden for five years is just over the top. If you weren't criticizing the obvious mental issues of Joe Biden in 2020 or his clear decline from even that low throughout "his" administration, I struggle to believe honest questions/concerns about Trump in 2025.
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Maybe its just because I'm calibrated on Joe Biden, but that seems well within normal range for Trump even in his first term.
Back then he'd make the occasional "covfefe" tweet or ramble on a weird topic for a bit.
The hour long video gives me a stronger sense of his health than the little snippets, either way.
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Yup. The major plausible (natural) causes of death at his age are cardiovascular disease and cancer. His habits indicate he's a relatively low risk for heart disease, so I'd be a little surprised to see a heart attack or stroke out of the blue, but even with cancer there's commonly much less than a year between "no symptoms whatsoever" and "medical investigation reveals tumor(s)". In the cancer cases I've been close to, at most there's been a subtle weird symptom that perfect hindsight would have looked at sooner (declining aerobic stamina that turned out to be lung tumors, in a smoker who didn't exercise and so didn't realize the low stamina was unusual; constipation that turned out to be a huge prostate tumor, in someone who had a poor low-fiber diet and didn't think much of the problem until it got very bad). In other cases, sometimes the decline has been as sharp as someone feeling perfectly fine one minute, then knocked unconscious by effects of their big brain tumor the next minute.
Age adjusted cancer death rates have dropped in half over the past 70 years, but a lot of that was the reduction in smoking, so medically staving off 50% of cancer is probably an upper bound. Effectively curing nearly half of cancers is pretty awesome, but the other half are still a real threat. 24% would be an overestimate for someone in above-average health, but give me 10:1 odds instead of 4:1 and between cancer and assassination I'd take the "President Vance" side of that bet.
We need a younger bench of politically interested and competent people, for this among many other reasons. It'll be interesting to see if either party manages to pull that off. I would have guessed the Democrats had the best chance, expected due to voter demographic breakdowns and indicated when they elected AOC at 29, but this week Wired is whining about "The Young, Inexperienced Engineers Aiding Elon Musk’s Government Takeover" (not-the-bee link, so you don't give Wired ad dollars for that) and I guess it's not impossible that this could end up a culture war issue polarized in the opposite direction instead.
There's a huge store of untapped talent in nerdy young men who will work wonders for the low low price of not being the side that kicks them in the teeth and spits on them.
Maybe it's possible to set up a "neutral vs liberal" situation, where you get to draw from the entire talent pool that isn't part of the "queer black girls in STEM" internship and scholarship system. Find the Asian guy who still got into Harvey Mudd, or the 1600SAT white guy at Cowpoke State U. who won a competition to decipher ancient burnt scrolls, and be the first person to reward them for their abilities or give them a compliment that isn't low-key accusing them of stealing recognition from "marginalized groups."
(Does anyone have that old quote from the guy whose school tried to disqualify him from some award because they didn't want to celebrate a white boy when there was a perfectly good Marginalized one they'd rather give it to?)
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