Hey what if one or both of these old guys were to die all of a sudden?

Scott’s post this morning about the death of a second Boeing whistleblower (for the record — I hate it when people way that btw, as there’s no almost always no actual record when they say it, unless what you say on a blog is for the record, which is kind of like what you say in an Arby’s being on the record — I think it’s likely these deaths are coincidental) made me consult, as one does, the Social Security actuarial tables, to get the answer to this question: What are the odds that Donald Trump, or Joe Biden, or one of the two of them, or both of them, die in the next six months, that is, prior to Election Day? And what are the odds that, assuming survival until then, each of them dies between January of 2025 and four years later?

I’m answering these questions on the basis of the 2019 actuarial tables, not 2020 (the most recent available), because the 2020 stats are made significantly worse by Covid, and we’re pretty much past that now I suppose.

And yes I realize these are statistical averages, and have only limited relevance to particular individuals, but I’m working off the assumption that the various factors here — upper class status and excellent health care on the one hand, genes on the other, doing a high stress job on a third hand, pretending to do that job while dealing with constant self-generated chaos in Trump’s case — tend to more or less cancel each other out, and that statistical averages have some meaning in these individual cases.

Anyway:

Odds that Trump dies in the next six months: 2.3%

Odds that Biden dies in the next six months: 3.3%

Ye Olde Calculator tells us that means there’s a 1 in 18 [!] chance that at least one of them dies in the next six months, which sounds remarkably high to me, especially given that there’s no possible way that Trump’s death between today and November 5th would be interpreted as anything other than the culmination of the deepest of all Deep State conspiracies.

A funny thing about statistics is that this also translates into just a 1 in 1,315 chance that both of them die within the next six months. So the election is unlikely to be between Kamala Harris and Kristi Noem.

*LGM apologizes to everyone in the world for that image. The unpaid intern responsible for inserting it into this post has been sacked.

Moving right along, the odds that Trump dies over the course of his second of what would likely be several more terms are 21%. Biden’s odds of dying over the course of a second term would be 29%.

So it’s a plain shame that poor Kristi Noem destroyed a 21% chance of becoming president just because she murdered a puppy in front of her own daughter and then advertised that she did this to the world in a book. I mean that’s why pencils have erasers and long guns have silencers. Bang bang shoot shoot.