The end of the decade of Trump

4 years ago, I warned that “Democrats and anti-Trump campaigners may be getting complacent about Donald Trump”, and I poured cold water on fantasies like Michael Cohen’s and John Harris’s that Trump wouldn’t run in 2024, or that Trump wouldn’t dominate the Republican Party after his first term, or that Trump would be easy to defeat in 2024. I warned that Trump was very likely to run for the presidency in 2024 unless he were incapacitated, which would have to mean prison — implausible — or death — about a 1 in 9 chance. I warned that, on the demand side, Trump led in intra-party (Republican primary) polling and arguably inter-party polling, winning 10 of 29 head-to-head polls against Joe Biden and 8 of 9 against Kamala Harris.

And I was completely vindicated. But I don’t mention this just to take a victory lap; I’m indicating that I don’t have the habit of being complacent about Donald Trump. Moreover, I’m not being complacent this time, at the close of 2025, when I note that there’s a much bigger chance than before that Trump fails to even complete his term, let alone fulfill the Trumpworld fantasy of running yet again in 2028 and winning.

Like before, I doubt that prison, or legal action more generally, are going to halt Trump’s political career. Trump could and should be impeached yet again, but I wouldn’t expect that to actually end his term; the US doesn’t really impeach and throw out its sitting heads of state. (It simply isn’t Peru or South Korea or Brazil or Lithuania or even Iran.) If Trump’s term ends early it’ll almost certainly be because of ill health, and it would probably have to be mortal illness or injury.1 I therefore repeat the exercise I did in 2021: consulting the Social Security Administration’s latest period life table and estimating Trump’s chance of death before January 2029.

In 2021 I used the 2019 period life table. Today I have the SSA’s period life table of 2022 available to me. This matters because the later life table, unlike the earlier one, reflects the impact of COVID-19. Previously I noted that, according to the 2019 table,

US men aged 75, 76, and 77 have annual chances of dying of 3.46%, 3.82%, and 4.22% respectively

but in the 2022 table those chances have inched up to 3.71%, 4.11%, and 4.52% respectively, reflecting general increases in death rates and decreases in life expectancy due to the pandemic. Though small increases in absolute terms, they suggest that Trump would now have a 3-year survival probability of 88.15%, even if he hadn’t aged 4 years in the meantime, instead of the 88.93% I calculated before.

But of course Trump has aged 4 years: he’s now 79. So I take the single-year death probabilities for men aged 79 (5.48%), 80 (6.07%), and 81 (6.70%); flip them to get single-year survival probabilities (94.52%, 93.93%, and 93.30%); and multiply those together to get a new 3-year survival probability: 82.84%. Flipping that gives Trump’s actuarial probability of dying in the next 3 years: 17.16%, more than 1 in 6.

Even that is slightly optimistic: what the SSA life table gives are single-year death probabilities for someone of a given exact age, i.e. someone who has just turned the specified age. Trump, by contrast, hasn’t just turned 79. His birthday is June 14, so he’s nearly half a year older than my calculations above assumed. To approximately correct for this, I can use average death probabilities for consecutive pairs of ages. For example, I average together the table’s age-79 probability (5.48%) and age-80 probability (6.07%) to get an age-79-and-a-half probability (5.77%), use that latter probability, then do the same for the age after that, and for the age after that.

That gives slightly higher single-year death probabilities of 5.77%, 6.38%, and 7.05%. Flipping and multiplying gives a 3-year survival chance of 81.99%, or a final 3-year death probability of 18.01%.

Purely in actuarial terms, the chance of a natural death curtailing Trump’s term has risen from 1 in 9, as of December 2021, to over 1 in 6 today. I can add that, by winning the 2024 election, Trump has also opted into a reference class at significant risk of assassination. In 2021 I pointed out that only one presidential candidate had been killed, but Trump is no longer just a candidate. He’s back in office, and 4 of 45 sitting Presidents have been assassinated; setting aside Trump as the case under discussion, that’s 4 in 44, for a 1 in 11 chance of a President being killed while in office. Adding together the 9% chance of assassination and the 18% actuarial chance of a more conventional death, then subtracting off the product of those two probabilities (to reflect the fact that Trump can’t realistically die by natural causes and assassination), gives about a 25% chance that Trump dies in office.

1 in 4 is not that high (and is certainly not grounds for complacency about Trump), but it is hardly negligible, and even that probability may be an underestimate. The evidence does not reveal Trump to be notably healthy for his age. Multiple health concerns about him emerged this year:

• his mysterious hand bruising, first noted a year ago, seems to have become permanent and then, just a week ago, spread to both hands;

• after an April physical examination that supposedly found Trump to have “unimpaired” blood flow to his extremities, Trump was photographed with swollen ankles, driving the White House to acknowledge that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency;

• Trump appears to be falling asleep in televised meetings, which Trump-watcher Michael Wolff claims is “unusual”;

• a droop on the right side of Trump’s face at a 9/11 commemoration sparked online speculation that Trump had suffered a stroke;

• Trump underwent an MRI scan in October, about which the White House initially refused to elaborate before declaring the scan “preventative”; and

• when Trump’s schedule was relatively light on public appearances over the Labor Day weekend, online rumors broke out that he might’ve died, quelled only when Trump appeared on the golf course and reposted AI-generated imagery of himself online.

Being subject to medical diagnostics and demonstrating old-man symptoms like drowsiness in long meetings may reflect normal aging, and it’s worth noting that the same SSA life table suggesting a 6% annual death probability for Trump also suggests that his remaining life expectancy is 8 years. And fervid rumors about a president’s health do not prove they’re about to die; we surely remember the flurry of speculation about Vladimir Putin (who remains very much alive) being seriously ill shortly after the Russian military (re-)invaded Ukraine in 2022. Still, having these sorts of rumors — and objective observations — circulating about a statesman is surely not a good sign for his health.

Possibly relevantly, elected Republicans appear to be increasingly “breaking with Trump”, even “turning against Trump”. This might simply reflect Republicans trying to get ahead of a probable midterm drubbing2 in an unpopular President’s second term. But it might reflect insider knowledge of Trump’s sickness.

Turning from the apex of the political system to the grassroots, the supposed “Peak Woke” “vibe shift” of 2021 or 2022 or 2023 — the alleged climax and inevitable fall of Anglosphere liberalism and leftism, basically — has itself stalled.

If we passed through Peak Woke™ years ago, then we have, by now, also passed through a trough of Woke™. Left-liberal activism and culture, and opposition to Donald Trump, have rebounded since Trump’s inauguration:

• the No Kings protests in July and in October both drew millions of protesters;

• Trump’s right-hand man Elon “pedo guy” Musk inspired his own protests and anti-Tesla vandalism;

• Democrats flipped over a fifth of GOP-held seats in this year’s legislative elections;

• The Economist found Democrats to perform better in 2025’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Georgia than in the 2024 presidential election (with recent outperformance higher to the extent that turnout fell);

• pro-Palestinian socialist Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary and then the mayoralty itself of New York City;

• support for immigration is up on last year;

• the guy in Washington, DC taken to court for allegedly throwing a sandwich at a border cop was acquitted;

• Marjorie Taylor Greene, however insincerely, apologized “for taking part in the toxic politics”;

• far-right podcaster and campus troll Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a possible social liberal;

• restaurant chain Hooters has retvrned to older, less-skimpy uniform designs;

• a federal judge issued an injunction against public school districts in Texas to make them take down displays of the Ten Commandments;

• Matt Gaetz’s podcast producer Vish Burra got shitcanned from One America News after posting an antisemitic cartoon online, and Dasha Nekrasova got dumped by her talent agency Gersh after she interviewed neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes on the Red Scare podcast;

• in a year that brought us Bong Joon-Ho’s anti-colonial, anti-white-purity movie Mickey 17 on wide release, movie critics raved about One Battle After Another (an action-ish movie starring gun-toting left-wing activists who raid a barbed-wire immigrant concentration camp) and Sinners (a period horror oriented around African-American music), while Eddington took aim at the Trump-backed AI data-center industry and the new Superman raised right-wing howls about it being too Woke™;

• Jeffrey Epstein emails released by House Democrats blew up the careers of Larry Summers and Peter Mandelson;

• even Trump’s ardent fans have been shaken by Trump’s mockery of Rob Reiner and Michelle Singer after their murder; and

• Trump’s approval this term is at a low.

Ten years after Trump came down the escalator and announced his run for President (while blaming Mexico for sending rapists to the US), he is finally being worn out, and he might be gone sooner than one hoped. Now is a good time to stand against him: it’s easier to push over a weak tower than a strong one.