Trump has reached the average male life expectancy
Tiana Lowe Doescher
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Just one day after pleading not guilty in Miami to his second indictment of the year, former president Donald Trump is celebrating his 77th birthday. One year older may not always mean one year wiser, but in this case, it does mean the former president has hit a landmark milestone: He has reached the average life expectancy for an American man.
President Joe Biden, at 80 years old, is of course three years past this point. Even when entering office in 2021, the president was our oldest ever, older on his first day in the Oval than Ronald Reagan was on his last. And of course, both Biden and Trump are running for a second term in 2024.
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When that term ends in January 2029, Biden would be 86 years old, and Trump would be 82. According to the Social Security Administration, an 86-year-old man has a 12% chance of dying within a year, and an 82-year-old one has an 8% chance.
The real problem with electing octogenarians to the White House is not just, or even primarily, that they have such a great risk of dying, becoming increasingly senile, or stubbornly resistant to good counsel. Rather, these two men, both more than 15 years older than the retirement age, will proudly continue to entrench the gerontocracy at the cost of workers and children.
It is no coincidence that the oldest Republican in the 2016 field was also the first in the party to pledge proudly that he would not touch entitlements. While Trump slowly coalesced older Republican voters in the 2016 primaries, millennials, who were much more likely to cite economic problems, including government spending, as their priority, lagged far behind in their support for Trump. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) bested Trump among voters under 30 in Texas, Virginia, and Nevada, and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) won with under-30s in South Carolina, Arkansas, and Iowa. And indeed, Trump rewarded the electorate as such, spending like a drunken sailor and sacrificing schools and the lives of young people to protect the elderly during the pandemic.
The shared strategy of Biden and Trump to do nothing on entitlements will work out fine for most boomers and abysmally for everyone else. Absent reform to Social Security, benefits will be slashed by 20% to 25% across the board within the decade, even as fewer and fewer workers are forced to shoulder each bill for seniors. Should Congress wish to stave off insolvency without spending reform, payroll taxes would need to rise by at least 25%. Balancing the budget without touching entitlements or defense spending would require literally decimating the nondefense discretionary budget by nearly 90%.
Both Trump and Biden have spent like men who will never have to pay for the consequences. One can only hope that perhaps the public decides to elect presidential nominees who have a little more skin in the game for when the boomers’ bill comes due.