How Long Will Donald Trump Live?

Medical Examiner

I asked some experts. The answer surprised me.

By

Shannon Palus

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June 14, 2026 5:45 AM

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Alex Wong/Getty Images and Getty Images Plus.

Donald Trump turns 80 on Sunday. Joe Biden was the first president to turn 80 while in office, but by the end of Trump’s second term in 2028, Trump will be the oldest person to have ever held the position, at 82 years, seven months. It’s a natural question (and one Slate posed when Biden entered the octogenarian club too): How long is he likely to live?

Reaching this age, he has already beaten the current life expectancy at birth for American males by three and a half years . In terms of assessing longevity, years beget more years. If you make it through being born (birth complications are among the leading causes of death for infants ); survive or have protection from illnesses like measles ; don’t have a freak accident in your 20s, succumb to suicide, cancer, or heart disease in your 30s through 60s, or have a stroke in your 70s, then you’ve made it to the octogenarian tier. You might be officially old, especially for a world leader, but once you’ve gotten here, there’s only about a 5 percent chance you’ll die within the next year. American men who are 80 today will, on average, live to be almost 89 years old.

So, based only on his current age of 80, Trump is likely to see eight more birthdays.

But Magali Barbieri, the co-director of the Human Mortality Database , thinks the odds are that someone with Trump’s medical and economic profile, or what we know of it, will live longer than that—into his 90s. She’s currently working on research looking at the socioeconomic characteristics of where people live (income, education, homeownership) and when they tend to die. For American men living in the wealthiest 10 percent of counties in the U.S., she says, “they would be expected to live another 9.2 years at 80.”

Then, she would give someone like Trump a couple more years on top of that. He doesn’t drink or smoke, and he’s staggeringly rich. Money and age at death are correlated: “More money means you live longer,” says Barbieri. Some of the reasons are obvious—rich people can afford to go to the doctor—but the trend holds for very high earners as well: She’d expect that someone making $5 million a year to live longer than someone making $4.5 million. Money may be far more protective than we really understand.

Of course, caveats abound. Anything could happen to Trump. Even if the average 80-year-old man will see his 88 th birthday, a large percentage of 80-year-old men will not make it to their late 80s. I put the Trump mortality question to Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, a demographer at the University of Minnesota, who has written for Slate about the alarming death rates among American millennials. (The crumbling social safety net has something to do with that.)

Looking at 2023 age-at-death data from the National Center for Health Statistics, Wrigley-Field notes in an email that of men who make it to 80, “11 percent will die by age 82, or a bit less than 18 percent by age 83—which are my quick ways of approximating dying by 2028.” So less than a 1-in-5 chance that he’ll die in office. Or maybe even lower: Some of the 80-year-olds who will die sooner than average have, by now, clear illnesses; unless he’s hiding something, Trump does not.

But things can just swerve health-wise—well, anytime in life, but especially for octogenarians. “As you get older and older, there’s a lot of unpredictability about when things exactly start to go awry in your biology,” says Jennifer Dowd, a demographer at the University of Oxford who writes the substack Data for Health . Given that fact, she also cautions against reading too much into Trump’s wealth as a life-extending factor—biology does come for us all—as well as, generally, putting much stock into all of these population-level averages. “It’s highly variable.”

Here’s what we know: Trump has made it to a birthday most American men will not celebrate; those who make it to 80 will, by and large, keep going a while longer. And right now Trump is up, about, and generally present, able to attend sporting events , able to wake up and bark into the phone . “As an ER doctor, I’ll walk down the street, and my brain just can’t help it. It’ll just go: ER patient, not ER patient, ER patient, not ER patient ,” says Jeremy Faust, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School. When it comes to Trump, he says, “I triage him as: He’s a guy who is 80 years old and is able to keep working and is able to spend most of his time doing whatever he calls ‘work.’ He’s not someone who appears to be unwell.”

Speculation about the president’s health, and how he is aging , abounds.…