Flashback to June, 2024
Put yourself into your mental state at the close of the 2024 primaries. Biden had agreed to debate Trump in June. There had been simmering press coverage for months about Biden’s age, his relative lack of speaking engagements, his difficulties in walking, and discussion around investigator Robert Hur’s conclusions about the President’s mental acuity. Ezra Klein had suggested that Biden should drop out and allow for an open convention to choose the nominee a couple months back but most people laughed at that proposal. Betting markets were giving Biden about an 85-90% chance of being the nominee, but pundits were, if anything, acting like prediction markets were selling dollars for 90 cents.
Then, the debate happened, and all hell broke loose.
In hindsight, it’s easy to say which signs should or should not have been apparent. The actions of an overworked octogenarian can appear like typical senior moments in one light, and like clear evidence of catastrophic mental and physical health in another.
We have squarely entered this same Rorschach era in Trump’s presidency. Where some see a President with a famously meandering speaking style, bruises from handshakes and typical mild ailments (for a 79 year-old) like chronic venous insufficiency, others see someone suffering from the aftermath of a stroke or the onset of severe dementia. And so, when the President flies under the radar without any major appearances for a week, people start to ask questions and the rumor mill begins to churn. I don’t think it’s going to be easy to ratchet back down to the prior status quo. Concerns about age and health will only continue to dog the President as he turns 80, 81, and 82 over his next three years in office. For example, the market on whether the President will leave office due to his health is at 27%, after spiking to above 40% for the few most intense hours of speculation this weekend.
A more fine-grained market on how Trump will leave office gives only a 73% chance that he will exit due to his term limit in January, 2029. Apart from passing away, the market gives nearly 10% odds to 25th amendment action, impeachment, resignation, or Trump remaining in power beyond his second term.
These are fairly liquid markets with hundreds of traders! I don’t think that punditry has really priced this in, and a 1 in 4 chance of health concerns leading to the end of Trump’s presidency implies a much higher likelihood of—still quite serious—health concerns that do not fully end his presidency but have serious repercussions nonetheless.
An Odd Press Conference
Trump’s surprise press conference announcement once again triggered speculation. Traders thought it was unlikely to be directly about his health, and indeed it turned out to be on the topic of the relocation of Space Command HQ from Colorado to Alabama. This is an odd topic for a hyped live stream in the oval office, with the V.P. nodding and smiling at his right hand. There isn’t much doubt in my mind that the press conference was primarily called to dispel any public concerns about Trump’s health before things spiraled out of control. The topic was a gimme, and the press conference achieved that. Despite the microanalysis from Twitter of his facial musculature, posture, and hand makeup, Trump sounded like he always has: bombastic, confident, and derisive of the fake news of his death from the press.
However, I think the Straussian read of Trump making an announcement about projecting high-tech, military strength is that he would very much like to nip in the bud any chatter of his weakness and age. Still, his odds of seriously attempting a 3rd term in 2028 have taken a slight dip.
Traders remain skeptical that we’ll see a similar preference cascade to the one against Biden’s nomination. I tried to come up with a couple market proxies for intermediate actions we might see if the President’s health takes a turn for the worse, that are easier to verify than conspiratorial backseat physician-ing. Adam Cochran on Twitter has been leading the charge in generating gossip of varying degrees of believability on the subject, and major news publications have picked up the slack in reporting the takes of doctors and psychologists on the health of the commander-in-chief. Ultimately I’m not so interested in speculating in this matter when there are more concrete actions that make for more robust Manifold markets.
For example, a market on whether 5 Republican members of Congress will call on Trump to resign by the end of next year (before the midterms, essentially) sits at just 7%. If the President’s health takes a turn for the worse, this seems like a strong proxy for serious concern.
The odds are higher, in fact, that Trump might disappear from the public eye for a prolonged period (longer than the ~6-7 days that he was off-camera for this last week). If these sorts of media breaks happen more frequently, as they did during the end of Biden’s term, I think this gives us useful clues about the health of the President.
It seems unlikely that even were the President suffering serious health concerns, that they’d be publicly disclosed, given the track record in presidential medical transparency over the last 8.5 years, but Manifold traders still view it as possible that news will leak.
Alternatively, we can just trust the resident Twitter Menswear Guy:
Roundup
Something is happening in this very specific market on the iPhone 17 release date:
There seems to be military escalation between the US and Venezuela in the South Caribbean as the US targets “narcoterrorists” in international (maybe) waters:
And traders are split as to whether survey data will show that women on the autism spectrum are more likely to believe in the supernatural (check out that market volume!):
Happy forecasting!
-Above the Fold