Donald Trump, Joe Biden could both die before 2024 re-run

Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential race. Picture: AFP

Nearly three quarters of Americans do not want Joe Biden to run for president again, and 60 per cent would prefer Donald Trump spend his final years brooding in Mar-A-Lago, according to a recent national NBC poll.

But events are conspiring against this silent majority, after Mr Biden’s announcement that he will be running for a second term. Increasingly, only fate stands in the way of a Biden v Trump rematch for the 2024 presidential election, but don’t write it off.

Mr Biden is almost guaranteed the Democrat nomination, given the difficulty challengers of incumbent presidents face. And Donald Trump’s polling among Republicans has soared since his launch in November.

But death and taxes are a certainty, as Benjamin Franklin once remarked, and it’s the former that should worry these two ageing warhorses, perhaps even bringing some macabre cheer to those Americans rooting for change.

Mr Biden, 80, has a 9 per cent chance of dying before the presidential election due in November 2024, and Mr Trump, no spring chicken himself at 76, a little over a 6 per cent chance, according to exclusive analysis of the US Social Security Actuarial Life Tables by The Australian.

So there’s a slightly greater than 15 per cent probability that either one of them – or both – heads to the big White House in the sky before polling day, mercifully relieving the world of the first presidential rematch in history since Grover Cleveland successfully sought revenge on president Benjamin Harrison in 1892.

Life Tables govern the forecasts the US government uses to estimate the outgoings of its US$1.2 trillion a year, publicly funded defined benefit pension system. They provide the statistical likelihood a person of average health of a given age dies in whatever number of coming years.

And who knows whether the pair fit that description.

Mr Biden’s gaffes and stumbles appear to have accelerated in recent months, including an inability to spell the word eight last week, frequent bouts of seeming confusion on stage, and falling upstairs boarding Air Force One in Poland, despite the learning opportunity provided by an earlier, similar experience.

Word has it the president wanted his forthcoming campaign to be based around a single word that defines America, which he revealed last year while swearing in a new Supreme Court justice.

But in a telling sign of the president’s declining capacities the White House has gone with “Let’s Finish the Job” and chosen a three-minute video, rather than a speech or press conference, perhaps to avoid scope for any further snafus that Republicans could use in their own election material.

As for Mr Trump, however impressive his longstanding temperance in relation to alcohol, he remains obese, reportedly having a BMI just over the red-line threshold of 30.

None of this would be lost on Vice-President Kamala Harris, practically a newborn in US politics at 58, who, more than any of her predecessors, will be a heartbeat away from the presidency if Mr Biden is successful next year.

The president, who would turn 86 in 2028, has a whopping 29 per cent chance of dying before the end of any second term, assuming he is re-elected, according to the Life Tables.

No wonder she looks so happy in the video.

Whoever Mr Trump picks as his running mate also has a good shot of moving into the White House without winning an election, given the Republican leader’s own 20 per cent chance of dying by then.

The probability either or both don’t make it to the end of 2028 is more than 43 per cent, almost a coin toss, and that’s assuming no Covid23 on the horizon.

The president’s two long-shot Democrat challengers, Robert F Kennedy and Marianne Williamson, have criticised the Democrat National Committee’s decision to refrain from scheduling any debates among Democrats seeking the party’s 2024 nomination.

Maybe they should put together a tentative schedule just in case.