:max_bytes(150000):strip_icc()/GettyImages-2233011272-28e658398df14463bc72ba9cc690137a.jpg "People Are Putting Money on Whether Trump Will End 2025 in the White House")
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Key Takeaways
- Speculation about President Donald Trump’s well-being gave way to event contracts on prediction markets, with folks betting on whether he’ll be in office by the end of the year.
- Event contracts current show bettors putting a less-than-10% probability on Trump leaving office by the end of 2025.
Will Donald Trump finish the year as president? You can bet on that now.
Prediction market Kalshi showed the start of an event contract named “Trump out as President this year?” on Saturday. At peak levels, bettors put a 10% chance on Trump leaving office before the year’s end; as of Tuesday late afternoon it was at 6%. What that meant: If someone purchases 100 contracts on the “yes” side of the equation, and is proven right, they would see a $94 profit.
The same question on rival platform Polymarket, which saw Donald Trump’s November victory coming, recently put the possibility at 7%. Death pools are generally illegal across the U.S., but the wagers account for the possibility of the president resigning due to health or other reasons. (Other public figures with open contracts regarding their leaving their current posts include Vice President JD Vance, the Fed’s Lisa Cook, and the president of Indonesia.)
The popularity of the Trump bets rose amid viral weekend speculation that President Donald Trump had passed away; he was photographed over the weekend leaving the White House for his golf course in Virginia, and on Tuesday afternoon he spoke live from the White House, an appearance that pushed the expectations that he would leave lower.
The White House had released a schedule with no planned Trump appearances over the long holiday weekend, perhaps fueling speculation. (It did not respond to Investopedia’s request for comment in time for publication.) Thousands of posts on the X platform included the words “Trump is dead” or “Trump died,” with a few purporting to offer sums of money for liking or retweeting their posts if the speculation proved true.
It did not—but those bets on remain open. The president, for his part, in a Sunday Truth Social post said he “never felt better in my life.”
This article has been updated since it was first published to reflect the change in perceived odds before and after Trump’s Tuesday afternoon appearance.
