Donald Trump Out 2025? How 25th Amendment Rules, Presidential Succession, and Political Stability Markets Price the Risk He Doesn’t Finish the Year

On most days lately, real money says there’s roughly a coin‑flip chance Donald Trump is not president of the United States on December 31, 2025.

On major prediction exchanges, contracts framed as “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?” or “Will Trump complete 2025 in office?” have been trading near 50¢ on the dollar. That price implies about even odds that something breaks the normal four‑year script in the very first year of his new term.

For professional traders and political‑risk desks, that headline number should stop you in your tracks. The U.S. has extremely strong institutional inertia: out of all presidencies, only about 20% have ended a term early, almost all from death or assassination, and none have involved a president being forced out for incapacity under the 25th Amendment. Impeachment‑and‑removal has never actually finished the job. Yet the market is effectively saying: “Treat 2025 as a stress year with a ~50% chance Trump is not in the chair by New Year’s Eve.”

To trade that intelligently, you have to get past the headline and into the plumbing of these contracts.

First, the structure matters. A market worded as “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?” usually pays YES if he legally holds the office at the market’s resolution timestamp (often 23:59:59 ET on December 31) and NO otherwise. That covers:

• Death
• Resignation
• Impeachment and Senate conviction (removal)
• A 25th‑Amendment transfer of power that leaves him no longer president by that date
• Any other constitutional succession event.

By contrast, a “Trump leaves office before Jan 1, 2026?” contract will often have the opposite payoff, but the same underlying event set. Small wording differences (time zones, whether an Acting President under the 25th counts as “Trump not president,” how disputed elections or temporary incapacity are handled) can move fair value by several points. For a desk sizing seven‑ or eight‑figure exposures, those definitional edges are not trivia; they are the trade.

The goal of this article is to take that blunt 50% market probability and decompose it into specific scenario buckets:

• Health or actuarial risk
• Voluntary exit or de facto resignation deals
• Impeachment and removal
• Invocation of the 25th Amendment
• Other institutional or systemic shocks

We’ll treat this not as a partisan argument, but as a toolkit: mapping each pathway, its historical base rate, its political feasibility, and the catalysts that would realistically move prices. If you’re trading these markets—or using them as inputs to broader political‑risk models—the aim is simple: stop reacting to the tweet of the day, and start sizing the actual probabilities embedded in the tape.

To get past the headline 50/50 and into tradeable structure, you need to see the full constellation of Trump‑tenure and succession markets—not just one “in office at year‑end?” contract.

2. Mapping the Trump‑2025 and Succession Market Landscape

Across major real‑money venues (notably Polymarket and Kalshi), the key clusters are:

1. Tenure / calendar‑snapshot markets

   • “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?” (our anchor).
     • Pays YES if he legally holds the office at the stated resolution time on Dec 31, 2025; NO if he has died, resigned, been removed after impeachment, or has been succeeded under the 25th Amendment or other constitutional mechanism.
   • “Trump leaves office before Jan 1, 2026?”
     • Typically the logical mirror: YES if any of those succession events occur on or before Dec 31, NO otherwise. Small wording and time‑zone quirks can break strict equivalence.

2. Impeachment markets (process, not outcome)

   • Example framings on Kalshi/Polymarket: “Will Trump be impeached in 2025?” or “Trump impeached before Jan 1, 2028?”
   • These usually resolve on a House impeachment vote only, regardless of whether the Senate convicts.
   • In recent trading, these sit well below tenure‑risk odds—generally in the low double‑digits or below—reflecting that markets see impeachment as one possible path to an early exit, but far from the dominant one.[^impeach]

3. 25th‑Amendment / incapacity markets

   • Example wordings: “25th Amendment invoked against Trump in 2025?” or “Trump declared unable to discharge duties in 2025?”
   • These tend to price in single‑digit probabilities, consistent with expert views that Section 4 is “unworkable except in cases of near‑unanimity about the president’s condition.”[^brennan]

4. Broader U.S. political‑stability contracts

   • Contracts on civil unrest, institutional breakdown, or constitutional crises (e.g., markets keyed to U.S. conflict‑risk dashboards or “major political violence in the U.S. in 2025”).
   • These don’t reference Trump directly, but they correlate with his tenure risk and provide hedges or relative‑value opportunities when tenure markets move faster than stability markets (or vice versa).

How scenarios hit each contract differently

• Death from natural causes or assassination

  • Tenure markets: NO on “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?”; YES on “leaves before Jan 1, 2026?”.
  • Impeachment: NO (never triggered).
  • 25th markets: Only YES if a formal declaration of inability is issued before death.

• Resignation or negotiated exit

  • Tenure: NO at year‑end; YES on “leaves before Jan 1, 2026?”.
  • Impeachment: Depends on wording—some contracts pay if he is impeached at any point in 2025, even if he later resigns; others are calendar‑bounded.
  • 25th: NO unless a 25th‑Amendment declaration actually happens.

• Impeachment and Senate conviction (removal)

  • Tenure: NO if removal occurs before Dec 31, 2025.
  • “Leaves before Jan 1, 2026?”: YES.
  • Impeachment markets: YES as soon as the House votes, even if the Senate acquits.

• 25th‑Amendment invocation / incapacity

  • If Trump is declared “unable” and the VP becomes Acting President:
    • Some tenure contracts still count Trump as “President” if he retains the office but not the powers; others key off who is exercising powers at resolution. That drafting choice can be worth several points.
  • If Congress ultimately sustains the finding and the VP succeeds to the office, tenure markets resolve NO.

Where the real money actually trades

Liquidity and tight spreads cluster in two places:

• The calendar‑snapshot tenure markets (our anchor), which concentrate the composite probability of any early‑exit path.
• The impeachment‑only markets, which are cheaper “lottery tickets” on a specific, more process‑driven route.

25th‑Amendment and generic stability contracts are typically thinner and more volatile; they can be mispriced relative to the main tenure line, especially after health scares or sensational headlines.

For the rest of this article, we’ll treat “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?” as the anchor contract and decompose its implied ~50% “NO” probability into specific scenario buckets (health, resignation, impeachment, 25th, and systemic shock), then cross‑check those against what the narrower markets are actually paying.

With the contract set, the next question for any trader is: how has the Trump‑2025 line actually traded as real‑world shocks hit? Even without a perfect tick‑by‑tick dataset, the qualitative pattern over the last 12–18 months is clear: long stretches of stability punctuated by sharp re‑ratings around legal, electoral, and health news.

The broad shape: from hypothetical risk to priced‑in stress

Pre‑election 2024, Trump‑tenure markets were thin and mostly a side bet: until it was clear he would actually return to office, “out by 2025” risk was hypothetical. Odds that he wouldn’t finish 2025 tended to sit well below today’s ~50%, reflecting both low liquidity and the real possibility he’d simply lose and make the contract moot.

Election night and certification were the first major repricing. Once it was clear Trump had won and the Electoral College process would stick, tenure contracts effectively flipped from “esoteric tail risk” to “live stress year.” Reporting on Polymarket in late 2024–early 2025 already had end‑2025 odds clustering around a coin‑flip, as traders started layering in age, legal exposure, and institutional friction. Volume increased and the market stopped trading like a novelty line.

Inauguration (Jan 20, 2025) marked a modest compression in early‑exit pricing: peaceful transfer and short‑term political calm tend to take a little premium out of catastrophe scenarios. Parallel Kalshi markets on impeachment, for example, were quoted at only ~11% odds of Trump being impeached before 2028 on Inauguration Day.[^kalshi] The core Trump‑2025 contract stayed elevated versus historical norms, but not in “panic” territory.

Through early 2025, the market oscillated in a band, with court rulings and docket news providing the main jolts. Positive rulings for Trump (especially on immunity and case timing) generally pulled early‑exit odds down a few points—if prosecution while in office gets harder, forced‑removal risk recedes. Adverse rulings or surprise procedural losses produced the opposite: short bursts of demand for “Trump out by end‑2025” that often faded as the legal system’s slow pace reasserted itself.

One of the clearest health‑driven inflection points came with Trump’s April 2025 Walter Reed physical, where his physician described him as “fully fit to serve as president,” with improved cholesterol, a lower BMI of 28, and a perfect MoCA cognitive score.[^physical] Health‑exit traders had to respect that datapoint: anecdotal order‑book reports and price screens showed a small but visible move toward Trump‑in‑office and a pick‑up in volume as shorts took profit.

Meanwhile, impeachment chatter has produced more smoke than fire. A House resolution (H.Res. 353) laying out seven articles and public endorsements from high‑profile figures (including Elon Musk’s viral call to impeach) briefly pushed Kalshi’s impeachment‑before‑2028 contract from the low teens toward ~17%,[^kalshi][^et] and tenure odds wobbled higher for “out by 2025.” But as Hill momentum stalled, prices mean‑reverted; the main Trump‑2025 line treated these as headline spikes, not regime changes.

Across these episodes, five categories of catalysts keep showing up whenever the chart jumps:

1. Election milestones and certification – turning hypothetical risk into actual tenure exposure.
2. Major Supreme Court / appellate rulings on immunity, criminal liability, or ballot status.
3. Impeachment signals – formal inquiries, resolutions, or credible bipartisan talk.
4. Health signals – official physicals, hospitalizations, or serious rumor cycles.
5. Cabinet / VP dynamics – resignations, leaks of internal revolt, or 25th‑Amendment chatter.

What an ideal dataset would look like

To move from intuition to measurement, a serious desk would build a daily event‑study panel that:

• Pulls daily close or VWAP, volume, and open interest for the anchor Trump‑2025 market from exchange APIs.
• Tags a curated event timeline (election milestones, court rulings, House actions, health disclosures, major cabinet moves) with precise timestamps and severity codes.
• Measures abnormal returns and volume in tight windows around each event type (e.g., −1/+3 trading days) to estimate which shocks actually move tenure risk and by how much.

Because full historical OHLCV+OI for these specific contracts is not cleanly available in public, we can’t show that regression here. But even the partial public record supports a consistent picture traders should internalize: Trump‑2025 odds don’t drift randomly—they sit in a high plateau, and then lurch when legal, health, or institutional news changes the path probabilities. That same pattern shows up in broader U.S. political‑stability markets, which tend to be calm until a court, a doctor, or Congress forces everyone to re‑price regime risk.

In the next sections, we’ll take that event‑driven lens and apply it pathway by pathway—health, resignation, impeachment, the 25th Amendment—so you can decide which spikes are worth fading and which might be the start of a structural repricing.

To turn that event‑study mindset into tradable structure, you first need the full, legally accurate menu of ways a president can lose power. Many traders implicitly price in mechanisms that simply don’t exist.

At a high level:

• There are only five constitutionally relevant pathways once a president is sworn in:

  1. Death
  2. Resignation
  3. Impeachment and Senate conviction
  4. 25th Amendment Section 3 (voluntary, temporary transfer to the VP as Acting President)
  5. 25th Amendment Section 4 (involuntary sidelining, potentially long‑term)

• Of those, only two mechanisms can forcibly strip a sitting president of effective power against his will:

  • Impeachment + conviction in the Senate (removal from office)
  • 25th Amendment §4, sustained by two‑thirds of both chambers (VP remains Acting President over an objecting president)

A criminal indictment or conviction by itself does nothing constitutionally. A president can be indicted, tried, and even convicted and still remain in office unless Congress acts (via impeachment) or the VP/Cabinet + Congress act (via 25th §4). The same is true of 14th‑Amendment disqualification arguments: before taking office, they can keep someone off the ballot or out of the Electoral College; after he is sworn in, actually removing him still runs through impeachment, the 25th, or a truly extraordinary Supreme Court intervention.

For market structure, the critical distinction is between:

• Removal – the president no longer holds the office (death, resignation, impeachment+conviction, or eventual succession after a prolonged 25th‑Amendment sidelining). Almost all “President on Dec 31, 2025?” markets treat this as a clean NO.
• Sidelining / Acting President – the president still holds the title, but another officer (the VP) exercises the powers as Acting President under the 25th. Whether this resolves as “Trump president” or not depends entirely on how the contract is drafted.

Most historical 25th‑Amendment use has been via Section 3 and for hours, not months: presidents voluntarily transfer powers for a medical procedure and then reclaim them. Section 4 has never been used to permanently displace a conscious, resisting president. That matters because some retail flows price Section‑4 coups as if they were symmetric with impeachment; in practice they are both rarer and harder.

Finally, traders need the vote math clear:

• Impeachment: simple majority in the House to impeach; two‑thirds of Senators present to convict and remove.
• 25th §4: VP + majority of Cabinet to start; if the president contests, VP + Cabinet must reaffirm within 4 days; then two‑thirds of both House and Senate must vote to keep the VP as Acting President.

Those thresholds are not just civics trivia. They are the pricing inputs when you ask how likely it is that any legal shock, criminal verdict, or health event actually turns into Trump not being in the chair at year‑end 2025—and whether a given contract keys off the office, the powers, or both.

5. 25th Amendment: Why Scholars Say It’s Almost Never a Live Trade

Once you understand the plumbing from Section 4 of the 25th Amendment, the trading question is straightforward: how much of that ~50% “Trump out by end‑2025” price can realistically be this pathway? Constitutional lawyers and former officials are almost unanimous: very little, unless there is an obvious medical collapse.

Designed for coma, not conduct

Analyses from Brookings, the Brennan Center, and other constitutional scholars converge on a narrow intended use‑case. Section 4 was drafted for scenarios like a coma, massive stroke, or advanced dementia—cases where there is near‑universal agreement that the president simply cannot function, not that he is reckless or unfit in a moral sense.

The Brennan Center characterizes Section 4 as essentially “unworkable except in cases of near‑unanimity about the president’s condition,” emphasizing that it is not a substitute for impeachment over misconduct. Brookings’ John Hudak flatly concludes that Trump “won’t be removed by the 25th Amendment,” arguing that treating garden‑variety authoritarian or norm‑breaking behavior as “inability” misreads the text and the politics.

In practice, that means most of the scenarios retail traders daydream about—provocative tweets, controversial orders, even defiance of court rulings—live in the impeachment bucket, not the 25th bucket.

The coup‑risk for the VP and Cabinet

Section 4 doesn’t begin in Congress; it begins inside the president’s own inner circle. The vice president plus a majority of the Cabinet must sign a written declaration that the president is unable. Against a combative, populist president, that looks, politically, like a palace coup.

If Trump contests—and he almost certainly would—Congress must then sustain the finding by two‑thirds in both chambers or his powers snap back. That creates a brutal payoff matrix for would‑be actors:

• If they succeed: they permanently sideline a president they’ve tied their careers to and inherit his base’s rage.
• If they fail: Trump returns to power with a clear list of disloyalists and every incentive to purge, humiliate, or prosecute them.

That asymmetric risk is why experts, including former White House and DOJ lawyers, treat Section 4 as a last‑ditch, health‑only option. The bar is not “Do we think he’s dangerous?” but “Are we prepared to end our careers and possibly our safety over a condition so obvious that two‑thirds of Congress will back us?”

January 6 as the real‑world stress test

If Section 4 were ever going to be used for misconduct, January 6, 2021 was the test case. The Capitol was under attack, Trump was refusing for hours to call off rioters, and congressional leaders were publicly urging Mike Pence to invoke the 25th.

Even in that environment—with maximum reputational cover and visible institutional danger—Pence and a Trump‑appointed Cabinet did not act. That choice is now Exhibit A for scholars arguing that Section 4’s practical trigger is incapacitation, not insurrection. If an unprecedented assault on Congress couldn’t produce a VP‑Cabinet revolt, markets should deeply discount the idea that ordinary political or legal crises will.

What this should do to your numbers

Specialized “25th Amendment invoked?” markets have tended to sit in low single digits, and that’s before you require not just invocation but sustained displacement of a contesting president through the two‑thirds‑of‑Congress hurdle.

For trading the anchor “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?” line, a disciplined decomposition might look like this in the current, no‑crisis state:

• Total “Trump out before Jan 1, 2026” probability: ~50%
• Slice plausibly attributable to an invoked‑and‑sustained 25th §4, absent a major health event: roughly 0.5–2 percentage points of that 50%.
  • That’s 1–4% of the early‑exit risk, and <2% absolute probability that Trump is out by year‑end 2025 because Section 4 was invoked and ultimately upheld against his objection.

Two refinements for serious desks:

• If a stroke, coma, or clear cognitive collapse hit the tape, 25th‑path odds would spike—but so would death and voluntary Section 3/resignation odds. You should treat 25th as one branch on a broader “severe health shock” tree, not as a stand‑alone scenario.
• In the absence of such a shock, if you are weighting the 25th bucket much above 1–2%, you are implicitly assuming a level of intra‑GOP revolt and bipartisan consensus stronger than anything seen even on January 6.

For most portfolios, that means Section 4 is best thought of as a tail‑within‑a‑tail: interesting for narrative hedges and niche side markets, but not a primary driver of pricing on whether Trump is still in the chair when the 2025 clock runs out.

6. Impeachment and Removal: Legally Plausible, Politically Remote

If the 25th Amendment is a tail‑within‑a‑tail, impeachment is the only other formal forced‑removal channel left for traders to price. But you have to separate two very different events that often get conflated:

• House impeachment – an indictment that requires only a simple majority.
• Senate conviction and removal – which requires two‑thirds of Senators present and has never yet succeeded against a president.

Trump has already stress‑tested this system twice. In 2019 (Ukraine) and 2021 (January 6), the House impeached him; both times, a Republican‑heavy Senate acquitted. Even in the second trial, with the Capitol still damaged and seven GOP senators voting to convict, the party as an institution shielded him from removal.

From a markets perspective, that history matters more than the legal merits. It tells you that under highly adverse conditions—including an attack on Congress itself—the modal Republican senator still chose to absorb reputational cost rather than break with Trump.

What the impeachment markets are actually saying

Dedicated impeachment markets price the process, not the outcome, and they trade well below the 50% anchor on Trump not finishing 2025.

On Kalshi, a long‑dated contract framed as “Will Trump be impeached before Jan 1, 2028?” has generally sat in the low‑teens—around the 11–17% band, with a small spike after Elon Musk publicly endorsed impeaching Trump and H.Res. 353 was introduced.[^kalshi][^et] That contract resolves YES on a House impeachment vote alone, regardless of what the Senate does.

Polymarket’s “Will Trump be impeached in 2025?” line has traded even cheaper, in the low single digits, reflecting both the shorter time window and the current House math.[^poly]

Those prices are telling you two things:

1. Markets see some chance that the House will pull the impeachment trigger again.
2. They see much lower odds that this is the main driver of the ~50% probability Trump is not president on 31 December 2025.

The substantive case: a long bill of particulars

On the legal merits, current impeachment resolutions and advocacy briefs are not thin. H.Res. 353, for example, lays out seven broad articles, and groups like ImpeachTrumpAgain.org enumerate overlapping allegations that constitutional lawyers widely view as squarely impeachable:[^hres][^impeach]

• Usurping Congress’s power of the purse – reprogramming or effectively creating funding streams outside normal appropriations, including through large foreign investments and private donations used to sustain federal operations during a shutdown.
• Unauthorized use of force – initiating or escalating military action against Iran and elsewhere without clear statutory authorization or imminent threat, sidestepping the War Powers Resolution.
• Interventions in DOJ and Jan. 6 cases – pressuring or directing law enforcement to terminate January 6 prosecutions, blanket‑pardoning rioters, and purging career officials.
• Abuse of trade and emergency powers – leveraging tariffs and emergency statutes as de facto personal or political tools.
• First Amendment and “tyranny” claims – targeting perceived enemies, dismantling congressionally mandated entities, and ignoring adverse court orders.

From a constitutional‑law standpoint, these look far more like classic “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” than edge‑case theory. Even some pro‑impeachment advocates, however, concede that the real problem isn’t law, it’s politics:

That gap—strong legal case, weak political appetite—is exactly what markets are trying to price.

What would it take to get to 67 votes?

For impeachment to matter to the “Trump out by 2025” contract, you need more than articles in the House; you need 67 senators willing to convict within the 2025 calendar window. Given recent history, that likely requires a three‑part regime change:

1. Catastrophic policy failure directly tied to Trump

   • An unauthorized or disastrously mismanaged war, a financial or constitutional crisis credibly laid at his feet, or clear defiance of a major Supreme Court ruling.
   • The kind of event where elites across both parties fear systemic damage more than base backlash.

2. A sharp break in GOP voter sentiment

   • Not just elite discomfort, but polling that shows Republican voters moving away from Trump after the crisis—sustained, not a weekend wobble.
   • Without visible erosion in the base, most GOP senators will continue to see voting to convict as career suicide.

3. Elite defection that gives cover

   • Senior Republican figures (former presidents, Senate leaders, ex‑Cabinet, Fox/Newsmax hosts, major donors) openly calling for removal.
   • Enough noise in conservative media that a “vote to convict” can be framed as saving the party, not betraying it.

The prior impeachments show how high this bar really is. January 6 delivered an extraordinary shock, and still only seven Republican senators voted to convict. To get to 67, you would need something worse than January 6 in both optics and polling impact, plus a coordinated elite pivot.

How much of the 50% is really impeachment‑driven?

Putting this together with the price screens and vote math, a reasonable decomposition for a current, no‑catastrophe baseline looks something like:

• Probability Trump is impeached by the House at least once in his new term: low‑teens (in line with Kalshi‑style markets).
• Conditional probability that such an impeachment leads to Senate conviction and removal at all: low, given past acquittals and partisan discipline.
• Conditional probability that conviction happens by the end of 2025: lower still, because investigations, hearings, and trial scheduling take time.

Multiplying those steps, you get a contribution to the anchor “Trump not president on Dec 31, 2025” line from impeachment‑and‑removal on the order of:

• Roughly 1–3 percentage points of absolute probability, in the current information set.

That’s non‑zero, and it will spike if a true crisis breaks—especially one that clearly implicates Trump personally, not just his administration in the abstract. But it is still well below what markets are implicitly assigning to health shocks, age‑related mortality, or some form of voluntary/negotiated exit.

For traders, the implication is straightforward: impeachment markets are primarily cheap tickets on House theater, not core hedges on early removal. They can be useful relative‑value instruments—for example, when impeachment odds jump on a headline but the anchor 2025 line barely moves—but they should only take a small slice of the risk budget you allocate to “Trump out by 2025” scenarios.

In the next section, we’ll turn to the more prosaic but much more heavily priced pathways: health, actuarial risk, and the probability that age alone pushes Trump out of office before the calendar does.

7. Trump’s Health Profile and Actuarial Base Rates

If impeachment and the 25th Amendment contribute only a few percentage points to early‑exit odds, the next obvious bucket is the one markets obsess over every time a president coughs: health and age.

Trump is old for a sitting president but, on paper, not unusually sick for an American man his age. That matters, because the difference between actuarial reality and market imagination is where a lot of edge lives.

Trump’s current health snapshot

Based on his April 2025 Walter Reed physical and prior disclosures, Trump’s profile looks like this:

• Age: 79 (born June 14, 1946)
• Height / weight: 6'3", ~224 lbs → BMI ≈ 28 (overweight, down from borderline obese in 2020)
• Blood pressure: ~128/74 mmHg (borderline‑elevated systolic, good diastolic)
• Lipids: long history of high LDL; now well‑controlled on rosuvastatin + ezetimibe, with total cholesterol ~140 mg/dL
• Resting heart rate: ~62 bpm
• Cognition: 30/30 MoCA score in April 2025 (normal cognition screening)
• Conditions on record: diverticulosis with a benign colon polyp (removed), treated cataracts, rosacea, prior elevated LDL
• Physician’s conclusion (Apr 2025): “fully fit to serve as president,” with “excellent” overall health.

These findings are extremely normal for a well‑monitored, upper‑income 79‑year‑old male in the U.S.: overweight but not severely obese; lipids aggressively treated; no disclosed diabetes, heart failure, or chronic lung disease; and no obvious cognitive impairment on standard screening.

There are two big caveats traders need to internalize:

1. Population vs. individual: These are summary metrics; we do not see raw imaging, full lab series, or any undisclosed diagnoses.
2. Measurement uncertainty: Height and weight are politically and personally sensitive; outside physicians have long speculated that he may be slightly shorter or heavier than reported. That would nudge the BMI up but not into an entirely different risk universe.

Nothing in the public record screams “extreme outlier” in either direction. He is not a Biden‑era marathoner, but he is also not presenting as a textbook cardiac cripple.

What the life tables say

Actuarial tables for U.S. males around age 79 give rough, population‑level base rates:

• 1‑year mortality: ≈ 2.5–3.5%
• 2‑year mortality: ≈ 5–7%
• Serious‑incapacity risk per year (major stroke, debilitating myocardial infarction, sudden dementia that clearly impairs function): low‑ to mid‑single‑digit percent

Trump’s profile—good lipid control, high medical surveillance, physically active lifestyle (golf), but overweight and high‑stress job—probably puts him near or slightly better than the median for 79‑year‑old American men, not dramatically worse.

If you combine death + clearly debilitating events over a 1‑year horizon, you end up with a single‑digit probability that something health‑related happens at all, and a smaller probability that it happens early enough and severely enough to remove him from office by Dec 31, 2025.

A plausible, disciplined back‑of‑the‑envelope for “out of office by year‑end because of health alone” might look like:

• ~3% chance of death in the year
• ~3–5% chance of a serious new incapacity event
• Only some fraction of those events either (a) occur early in the year, or (b) are handled by resignation/25th rather than continued service or quick recovery

That leaves you in the ballpark of 3–6% for health‑driven early exit over the 2025 window.

Is that precise? No. But it’s the right order of magnitude if you start from actuarial tables rather than social‑media “he looks terrible” narratives.

How this stacks up against the market’s 50%

Set that 3–6% actuarial bucket next to the ~50% “Trump not president on Dec 31, 2025” price on major exchanges:

• If you naively treated the entire 50% as a health trade, you would be implying an order‑of‑magnitude jump over base mortality/incapacity for a man with fairly well‑controlled risk factors.
• To justify that purely on health, you’d need evidence of serious undisclosed disease (advanced cancer, heart failure, unstable coronary disease) or plainly visible decline—which the April 2025 physical and MoCA score do not support.

So one of two things must be true:

1. Traders are badly overpricing health risk, ignoring the boring reality of actuarial tables; or
2. Most of that 50% is coming from non‑health pathways—legal, political, or systemic shocks—with health just a small slice of the pie.

Given how low dedicated “Trump serious health event?” and 25th‑Amendment markets tend to trade, the second story fits the tape better. Markets seem to be saying: “Actuarial risk is there, but the real action is politics, prosecutions, and institutional stress.”

For positioning, that has two implications:

• If you think public health information is roughly accurate, there is a decent case that health‑only exit is over‑discounted relative to the wall‑to‑wall speculation it gets in media coverage.
• If you think there is significant hidden health risk, the cleanest expression may be targeted incapacity or health‑shock markets, not the broad “out by 2025” line, because the latter is dominated by non‑health scenarios.

In the next sections we’ll lean into those other buckets—resignation or negotiated exit, and broader systemic shocks—to explain where the rest of that 50% is plausibly coming from, and how to tell a genuine regime‑change catalyst from noise.

8. How Often Do Presidents Fail to Finish Their Terms?

The ~50% odds that Trump is not president on 31 December 2025 look extreme until you remember that U.S. presidents do fail to finish terms more often than intuition suggests. Out of 46 presidencies, nine have ended early.

But that topline ~20% historical base rate is badly misleading if you apply it naively to a modern‑era, Trump‑specific trade. You need to see who exited, how, and when in the term.

The nine clear early‑exit presidencies

There are nine uncontested cases where a president did not complete the term he was serving:

• Natural deaths in office: William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren G. Harding, Franklin D. Roosevelt
• Assassinations: Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, John F. Kennedy
• Resignation: Richard Nixon

Woodrow Wilson (massive stroke, 1919) is the classic near‑miss on incapacity, but he formally finished his term; there was no constitutional transfer of power.

These nine cases produce the headline stat often quoted in headlines and even in our Section 1: 9 of 46 presidencies ≈ 19–20% ended before the scheduled term expiry.

Early exits happen all along the term

Another useful nuance: early exits are not just a “late second‑term” phenomenon. Historically they’ve occurred at almost every point in the cycle:

• Within months of inauguration: Harrison (31 days), Garfield (~6½ months), McKinley’s and FDR’s new terms (~3–6 months in)
• Mid‑term: Taylor (~1.3 years), Harding (~2.4 years), JFK (~2.8 years)
• After a full term but early in the second: Lincoln and McKinley were killed just after being re‑elected; Nixon resigned about 1½ years into his second term

For tenure markets, that means you can’t simply say “it’s only one year, so risk is low.” The historical record absolutely includes first‑year exits, especially in the 19th–early‑20th century when infectious disease and cardiovascular risk were largely uncontrolled.

Why the raw 20% base rate is too crude

For trading Trump 2025, though, that 20% headline is a poor prior.

1. Modern medicine has slashed natural‑death risk in office.
   All four natural‑death cases (Harrison, Taylor, Harding, FDR) predate statins, CT scans, thrombolytics, and ICU care. The last natural death in office was 1945. Today, a president’s health is heavily surveilled and aggressively managed. As we saw in Section 7, actuarial one‑year mortality for someone of Trump’s profile is on the order of low single digits, not 20%.

2. Assassination risk has fallen sharply with modern security.
   Four presidents were killed between 1865 and 1963; none since JFK. There have been serious attempts (Ford, Reagan), but the combination of the Secret Service, intelligence, and hardened venues has dramatically lowered the realized hazard. Using 19th‑century assassination frequencies as a prior for 2025 is a category error.

3. Resignation is a one‑off, not a recurring pattern.
   Nixon’s 1974 exit is the sole resignation case in 235+ years. It required a unique alignment: smoking‑gun tapes, bipartisan elite revolt, and collapsing public support. Impeachment is more common now; resignation under threat of certain removal is still very rare.

4. Hyper‑polarization cuts both ways.
   Modern presidents probably engage in more conduct that lawyers would call impeachable, and impeachment in the House has become more frequent (Clinton once, Trump twice). But polarization also reduces cross‑party willingness to convict in the Senate. Since JFK, the only president who failed to finish his term was Nixon—and that was half a century ago.

A more realistic read is:

• 19th–mid‑20th century: high physical‑risk environment; early exits driven mainly by mortality and violence.
• Late‑20th–21st century: much lower physical‑risk; early‑exit risk is dominated by politics, yet formal removals/resignations have not recurred since 1974 despite serious scandals and an assassination attempt.

So while “9 of 46” is a useful ceiling on institutional inertia—the U.S. is not magically immune to losing presidents mid‑term—it overstates modern early‑exit probabilities if you don’t adjust for the era.

Compared with other advanced democracies

It’s also important not to over‑interpret U.S. stability as universal. In other rich democracies:

• Leaders fail to finish their mandate far more often, but typically via parliamentary mechanisms: party coups, lost confidence votes, or early elections.
• The UK, Canada, and Australia all have long lists of prime ministers who left office mid‑parliament, often after only 1–3 years, replaced by a new party leader without an election.
• Early exits there are political, not physical; assassinations and deaths in office are extremely rare.

For traders, the cross‑country lesson is:

• The U.S. presidency is physically safer today than in its first century.
• But its political risk is catching up to other democracies—not through easy removals, but through constant constitutional stress.

Put differently: the historical base rate of 20% is a noisy mix of old‑world mortality and mid‑20th‑century violence. For a 2025 Trump trade, your starting point should be much lower for death/assassination, then layer in Trump‑specific political and legal tail risk—which is exactly what the next sections will do for resignation and systemic shocks.

9. U.S. Political Stability Signals: Fragile States, V-Dem, and Conflict Watchlists

The last section showed why historical early‑exit rates overstate modern physical risk for U.S. presidents. The missing piece is systemic risk: how likely is it that the institutional environment around Trump is unstable enough to produce extra‑constitutional or negotiated exits that don’t show up in simple mortality tables?

Here, broad political‑stability indices are useful slow‑moving priors. They don’t tell you whether Trump personally leaves in 2025, but they frame how big the “constitutional stress / democratic breakdown” bucket plausibly is.

What the stability indices are actually saying

On the Fragile States Index (FSI), the U.S. still sits in the low‑fragility, high‑capacity tier—but its trend since 2016 is sharply negative. Fund for Peace highlights worsening scores on:

• Factionalized elites and group grievance
• State legitimacy and public services
• Security apparatus and political violence

Between 2016 and the early‑2020s, the U.S. recorded one of the steepest deteriorations among OECD countries, driven by polarization, contested elections, and episodic violence.[^fsi]

The V‑Dem project tells a similar story from a democracy‑quality angle. Its Liberal Democracy Index shows the U.S. as a clear “autocratizing” and later “backsliding democracy” in the late 2010s, with measurable declines in constraints on the executive, judicial independence, and clean elections. Recent reports show some recovery, but scores remain below early‑2010s highs, and polarization is flagged as a persistent structural risk.

Conflict‑focused monitors go further. The International Crisis Group added the United States to its 2024 Conflict Watchlist, warning of “intensifying polarization and the risk of election‑related violence” around the Trump–Biden rematch.[^icg] ACLED and similar datasets show that political violence and armed demonstrations spiked after 2016 and remain elevated vs. pre‑2010 norms.

Relative to truly fragile states, the U.S. still enjoys strong fiscal capacity, cohesive national security forces, and deep capital markets. That keeps probabilities of outright state collapse or a classic military coup in very low single digits. But the negative trendlines justify a non‑zero structural premium for:

• Contested authority (dueling claims to legitimacy)
• Defiance of court orders or Congress
• Localized political violence that constrains what formal institutions can do in practice

How this interacts with Trump‑specific risk

These macro indices are not independent of Trump. His politics both reflect and reinforce the underlying drivers they measure:

• High polarization raises the odds of norm‑breaking behavior in office—pressuring DOJ, ignoring subpoenas, testing the limits of emergency powers.
• The same polarization makes remedies harder: impeachment and 25th‑Amendment actions require cross‑party elites who now face intense primary risk and, in some cases, physical‑security concerns.

That combination supports a small but rising tail where the system cannot or will not use clean constitutional tools, and instead muddles toward:

• De facto power‑sharing with other actors (VP, military, states, courts)
• A negotiated resignation framed as a “deal” to avoid broader conflict
• Ambiguous situations where Trump still claims the title, but key institutions stop treating him as legitimate

Most tenure contracts are not written with these gray‑zone outcomes in mind, which is precisely why serious traders should be thinking about them.

Using stability metrics as trading inputs

For pricing “Trump not president on Dec 31, 2025?”, these indicators are best used to size the systemic‑shock slice of your decomposition:

• In a low‑polarization, high‑trust baseline, you might assign well under 1% to “extra‑constitutional crisis leading to early exit in 2025.”
• Given current FSI/V‑Dem/Conflict‑Watchlist readings, it’s defensible to nudge that to 1–3%—still a tail, but big enough to matter when the whole contract trades near 50%.

Then watch cross‑markets:

• Contracts on major U.S. civil unrest or political violence in 2025
• Markets keyed to U.S. democracy ratings or constitutional‑crisis scenarios

If those stability‑linked lines are calm while Trump‑out‑by‑2025 odds spike, the move is likely about idiosyncratic legal or health news, not systemic breakdown. If both reprice together—especially around elections, Supreme Court rulings, or large‑scale protests—you’re probably seeing the market tentatively mark up the constitutional‑crisis bucket.

That framing sets up the next step: translating abstract “systemic risk” into concrete scenarios—contested rulings, non‑compliance, negotiated exits—and deciding how much of the tape’s 50% you really want to attribute to them.

10. Decomposing the 50%: A Scenario Tree for Trump Being Out by End of 2025

With the plumbing and base rates in hand, we can finally answer the core trading question: if the anchor market is around 50% that Trump is not president on 31 December 2025, what paths actually add up to that number?

Think of this as a scenario tree, not a precise forecast. The goal is to break the composite price into mutually distinguishable buckets that you can monitor and update:

• A. Death or severe health incapacity
• B. Voluntary resignation or negotiated exit
• C. Impeachment and Senate conviction (removal)
• D. Sustained 25th‑Amendment §4 sidelining
• E. Other edge cases / systemic shocks (novel legal ruling, forced non‑recognition, extra‑constitutional breakdown)

Below are illustrative absolute probabilities for “Trump out by Dec 31, 2025” via each bucket, consistent with the base rates and politics we’ve already discussed.

Bucket A: Death or severe health incapacity (actuarial core)

Using Trump’s age/health profile and life‑table benchmarks from Section 7, the actuarial contribution looks roughly like:

• A. Health‑driven exit by end‑2025: ~3–7%
  • Combines ~3% one‑year mortality and a similar‑order risk of major stroke/MI/cognitive event, discounted for timing (it has to happen early and be severe enough to force a transfer).

This is the cleanest, most quantifiable slice of the tree. If you are anywhere near actuarial priors, health alone cannot explain a 50% early‑exit price.

Bucket B: Voluntary resignation or negotiated exit

A Trump resignation is psychologically hard to price—his brand is built on defiance—but it’s not impossible if the alternative is:

• Near‑certain impeachment and removal, plus
• Credible legal or financial exposure to himself or his family after leaving office.

Here, think Nixon 1974, but with a much more polarized party and weaker elite consensus. That pushes probabilities down.

• B. Voluntary / negotiated exit by end‑2025: ~1–4%
  • The low end reflects Trump’s ego and base loyalty.
  • The high end assumes a severe legal/constitutional crisis in 2025 where resignation plus some form of informal guarantees becomes the least‑bad option for both Trump and GOP elites.

Bucket C: Impeachment + conviction (formal forced removal)

From Section 6, even with a non‑trivial chance of impeachment, the odds of conviction and removal by end‑2025 are small:

• House impeachment odds: low‑teens over the full term in dedicated markets; lower for 2025 specifically.
• Senate conviction requires 67 votes—meaning a mass GOP defection in a polarized environment.

A disciplined composite for “removed by conviction in 2025” looks like:

• C. Impeachment + conviction by end‑2025: ~1–3%

That’s enough to matter at the margin, and it will spike temporarily around any catastrophic scandal, but it does not drive most of the 50% tape.

Bucket D: Sustained 25th‑Amendment §4 sidelining

As Section 5 showed, constitutional lawyers treat Section 4 as almost unusable against a conscious, resisting president except in clear medical collapse. Markets for “25th invoked?” already trade in low single digits before requiring that Congress sustain the finding.

It is hard to justify more than:

• D. 25th §4, invoked and sustained so Trump is effectively out by end‑2025: ~0.5–2%

If you are above that range, you are implicitly assuming an intra‑GOP revolt stronger than what we saw after January 6.

Bucket E: Other edge cases / systemic shocks

That leaves a residual category for scenarios that are hard to shoehorn into clean constitutional boxes but would still resolve the tenure contract NO by year‑end:

• A novel Supreme Court ruling that retroactively disqualifies or voids his tenure under the 14th Amendment or some untested theory, after he is in office.
• A contested legitimacy / dual‑authority crisis where enough institutional actors (military, agencies, courts, key states) stop treating Trump as president that markets and exchanges treat a successor as the de facto officeholder.
• An extended constitutional standoff that ends in a bespoke bargain: step down in exchange for legal or financial concessions, potentially framed as “I choose not to continue” for face‑saving purposes.

In a low‑polarization, low‑stress polity, you might put this bucket at well under 1%. In the actual U.S. environment flagged by Fragile States Index, V‑Dem, and Conflict Watchlists, a realistic structural tail is somewhat higher.

To make the anchor market’s ~50% plausible, most of the mass has to sit here and in B, because A–D simply don’t get you anywhere close by themselves. An illustrative range:

• E. Other edge cases / systemic breakdown / novel legal outcomes: ~10–30%

Think of this as the adjustable dial: if you believe institutions are sturdier than the tape implies, you put E at the low end and conclude the market is rich. If you believe autocratization and legal chaos are heavily underpriced, you move toward the high end.

Putting the buckets together (and why they don’t just add)

If you take midpoints:

• A (health): ~5%
• B (resignation): ~3%
• C (impeachment + removal): ~2%
• D (25th §4): ~1%
• E (systemic / edge): say ~20%

You get ~31%, not 50%. That’s intentional: the tree is path‑dependent and correlated:

• A severe health shock might end in death, voluntary Section 3, or 25th §4—you can’t just stack those probabilities.
• A legal mega‑shock could yield impeachment + acquittal, then negotiated exit, or a long stalemate with no early exit at all.

The message is: if you are taking the headline ~50% at face value, you are implicitly assuming either (a) much higher odds in B/E than most historical priors support, or (b) compounding several highly correlated crises.

How miscalibration creeps in

Many traders quietly over‑weight vivid stories (a 25th‑Amendment “coup,” a Hollywood‑style impeachment trial) and under‑weight slow, grinding scenarios:

• Structural squeezes (funding crises, court‑order defiance) that drag on for months before producing a grudging resignation.
• Coordinated elite pressure that never makes for a single dramatic event but gradually boxes Trump in.

Those slow‑burn paths almost all live in B and E, not C or D. If your mental model is dominated by impeachment votes and 25th chatter, you are probably misallocating probability mass.

The fix is simple: turn this scenario tree into a spreadsheet. Plug in your own numbers for A–E, force yourself to sum to the anchor market, and then watch the news through that lens: “Did this event really move bucket B or E by 5 points, or is it just headline noise?” That discipline is where most of the edge lives in trading Trump‑tenure risk.

11. Trading and Hedging Around Trump Tenure and Succession Risk

Once you have a scenario tree for why Trump might be out by end‑2025, the next step is turning it into trades, hedges, and sanity checks across related markets.

11.1 Cross‑checking linked markets

Most pricing errors show up as violations of simple probability logic. Treat the main lines as linked instruments on the same state space:

• T = Trump not president on 31 Dec 2025 ("out by 2025" NO‑tenure leg)
• I = impeached by the House (process only)
• R = impeached and removed by the Senate by end‑2025
• F = 25th Amendment §4 invoked and sustained by Congress
• H = serious health/incapacity event

Then the following should always hold:

• P(R) ≤ P(T) – you can’t be removed and still finish the year.
• P(F) ≤ P(H) – sustained 25th use is a subset of severe health‑/incapacity‑type states.
• P(I in 2025) ≤ P(I before 2028) – calendar‑bounded impeachment odds must be lower.

In price space (YES‑side prices in cents), violations of these are red flags:

• If “Trump removed by impeachment in 2025?” is 20¢ while “Trump out by end‑2025?” is 15¢, something is wrong in the tape or wording.
• If 25th‑specific markets trade at or above dedicated health/incapacity lines, you’re likely looking at retail over‑weighting the coup narrative.

Use these as daily cross‑checks: build a sheet that pulls all related contracts and highlights when these inequalities flip.

11.2 Relative‑value and quasi‑arb set‑ups

Because you can’t short constitutional events, most opportunities are relative‑value, not pure arbitrage.

1. Expensive composite, cheap pathways
When T (out‑by‑2025) trades rich (e.g., around 50%) while:

• Impeachment in 2025 is in low single digits on Polymarket,
• Impeached before 2028 sits near low‑teens on Kalshi,
• 25th‑Amendment odds are low single digits,

then the market is implicitly stuffing a lot of weight into health + negotiated exit + systemic shock. If you think those buckets are overdone:

• Short T (bet on Trump still in office) and
• Optionally own small I or H tickets as cheap disaster hedges.

2. Headline spikes in process markets
After events like H.Res. 353 or Elon Musk’s impeachment calls, Kalshi’s long‑dated impeachment line jumped toward ~17% while tenure odds only nudged.[^kalshi][^et] Typical trade:

• Sell elevated impeachment odds (fade the process headline)
• Keep core exposure in the tenure contract, which historically moves less and mean‑reverts as Hill momentum stalls.

3. Overpriced 25th‑Amendment contracts
Given the structural hurdles, long‑run fair value for F is well below 2% absent a medical collapse. 25th markets that print mid‑single digits on rumor are candidates to sell into strength, hedged with:

• A small long in health/incapacity markets, or
• A tighter stop, given thin liquidity.

11.3 Using tenure risk as a portfolio hedge

For institutional investors, the main use of these contracts is as macro overlays:

• Regulatory/Big Tech: A Trump exit that brings a less confrontational administration could ease antitrust and content‑moderation pressure; long T (out‑by‑2025) can hedge concentrated exposure to platforms most vulnerable to an extended Trump agenda.
• Healthcare: Trump‑era policy has repeatedly targeted the ACA and federal healthcare programs,[^kff][^advisory] raising earnings risk for hospitals, insurers, and Medicaid‑heavy providers. Long T can hedge portfolios that benefit from policy continuity and stable ACA subsidies.
• Defense and foreign‑policy plays: If you believe Trump is more likely than a successor to pursue disruptive tariffs, NATO burden‑sharing shocks, or Iran escalation, a Trump‑exit‑by‑2025 long can be paired against high‑beta defense/aero names.
• Macro volatility: Treat tenure markets as low‑delta, event‑driven overlays on rates, USD, and equity vol—particularly around Supreme Court rulings, impeachment votes, or major health disclosures.

Position sizing should reflect path dependency: you can sit flat for months and then see your entire P&L made or lost in a 48‑hour window when an indictment, stroke, or cabinet revolt hits the tape.

11.4 Liquidity, regime risk, and platform risk

Tenure and impeachment markets are still niche products. Practical implications:

• Order‑book depth is thin away from the mid; a single large order can move prices 5–10 points.
• Rumor‑driven gapping: Low‑info flows after a tweet about “health scares” or “25th talk” can blow spreads out before facts catch up.
• Regulatory risk: CFTC posture toward U.S. political contracts is itself a material risk. A rule change, no‑action relief revocation, or forced early settlement can crystallize P&L in ways unrelated to Trump’s actual tenure.
• Platform concentration: Don’t let your book hinge on one exchange’s solvency or legal status; diversify across venues and keep gross exposure within what you can afford to lose in a worst‑case delisting.

Model platform/regime risk as its own scenario—e.g., a 1–3% chance that contracts are frozen, capped, or cash‑settled at arbitrary marks.

11.5 Rules of thumb for trading Trump‑tenure risk

To turn all this into a practical playbook:

1. Anchor on the composite, not the story. Start with the anchor “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?” line; decompose it into A–E buckets, and ask which one the latest news actually touches.
2. Underweight 25th‑specific trades. Treat Section 4 as a tail within a tail; most early‑exit risk comes from health, negotiated outcomes, or political shocks—not a palace coup.
3. Respect actuarial math. Health‑only exits are likely a single‑digit slice of the 50%; don’t let Twitter photos override life tables.
4. Exploit misaligned sub‑contracts. Look for moments when T, I, and F break simple probability relationships; those are your best RV entries.
5. Size for boredom, price for panic. Assume long periods of flat tape punctuated by sudden 5–20‑point repricings; keep core positions small, and use resting orders to provide liquidity around catalysts instead of chasing gaps.

The next section will show how to monitor concrete trigger events—from Supreme Court decisions to health bulletins—and map them systematically to these buckets so you’re trading a process, not refreshing headline feeds.

With the scenario tree and trading toolkit in place, the last piece is forward‑looking discipline: knowing which real‑world events should actually move your Trump‑2025 odds, and by roughly how much and in which bucket.

Think of this as a living event watchlist feeding directly into your A–E scenario probabilities (health, resignation, impeachment, 25th, systemic shock).

12.1 Legal and Constitutional Milestones

These are the most predictable calendar catalysts and often produce the cleanest, non‑emotional repricings.

Supreme Court rulings to track:

• Presidential immunity scope – Does the Court narrow or expand criminal and civil exposure for acts in office?
  • Impact: A broad immunity ruling shrinks buckets B/C/E (resignation, impeachment, systemic crisis). A narrow ruling expands them by raising the odds that legal jeopardy bites during the term.
• Cases touching 14th‑Amendment disqualification, election procedures, or emergency powers – Any decision that constrains or blesses aggressive uses of executive power feeds directly into E (systemic shocks).

Key appellate decisions (D.C. Circuit, 11th Circuit, state supreme courts):

• Rulings on whether and when Trump can be tried while in office in federal or state cases.
  • Impact: Adverse timing rulings that push trials into 2025–26 raise impeachment and negotiated‑exit odds (B/C) because new facts can emerge under the klieg lights; indefinite stays lower them.

State‑case and disclosure triggers:

• Civil or criminal cases that force detailed financial or business disclosures, put the Trump Organization under new constraints, or threaten major fines/asset sales.
  • Impact: Primarily bucket B/E – sustained personal or financial pressure that could make a behind‑the‑scenes exit bargain thinkable.

For each major ruling, your default question should be: Did this materially change Trump’s legal leverage or personal downside in 2025, or just the narrative? If it’s the former, you re‑weight B/C/E; if it’s the latter, you fade the move.

12.2 Political Triggers: Elites, Staff, and the VP

Markets have historically under‑reacted to early signs of elite defection and over‑reacted to loud but cheap talk.

Watch specifically for:

• Cabinet or senior‑staff resignations on principle

  • E.g., Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, White House Counsel, Chief of Staff leaving and publicly citing constitutional concerns or defiance of court orders.
  • Impact: First big resignation nudges impeachment/systemic buckets (C/E) a couple of points; a cluster within weeks is a regime‑change signal.

• VP–White House rifts

  • Leaks that the VP was excluded from key briefings, refused to back a controversial order, or is consulting outside legal counsel.
  • VP building a distinct brand in conservative media, distancing from Trump.
  • Impact: Raises odds of elite‑brokered outcomes (B) and, at the margin, 25th chatter (D), though Section 4 still remains a tail‑within‑a‑tail.

• GOP elite defection in conservative media and 2026 primaries

  • Fox/Newsmax hosts, talk‑radio figures, and megadonors openly calling for “a post‑Trump GOP.”
  • High‑profile 2026 endorsements against Trump‑aligned candidates in safe‑red seats.
  • Impact: Slow‑burn signal that future impeachment/removal or resignation might become electorally survivable for Republicans; nudges C and B over quarters, not days.

12.3 Health Signals: Separating Rumor from Repricing

Given Trump’s age, health stories will keep hitting the tape. The key is to distinguish priceable data from clickbait:

High‑signal events (should move bucket A, and maybe D):

• Official presidential physicals with new, adverse findings (e.g., new cardiac diagnosis, significantly impaired cognitive scores).
• Any unplanned hospitalization, cardiac work‑up, stroke‑like episode, or emergency imaging confirmed by press pool + physician statement.
• Documented, sustained reduction in public schedule (months of curtailed travel and live events) matched by credible reporting.

Low‑signal, tradable overreactions:

• Single viral clips of slurred words, tripping, or looking tired, without corroborating medical reporting.
• Anonymous social‑media “doctor” threads without named sources or medical records.

Your default playbook: respect real medicine, fade meme cycles. When rumor alone pushes 25th‑Amendment or health‑shock markets several points while tenure odds barely move, selling that spike—with tight sizing—is often the edge.

12.4 Systemic‑Risk Events: From Protest to Constitutional Standoff

These are low‑frequency but high‑delta catalysts for bucket E:

• Large‑scale, sustained protests or political violence

  • ACLED‑style spikes in armed demonstrations; attacks on federal buildings or election infrastructure.
  • Impact: Raises both systemic‑risk pricing (democracy/violence markets) and, if Trump is seen as instigator or bystander, impeachment/systemic‑exit odds.

• Government shutdowns plus norm‑breaking executive behavior

  • Using informal funding streams, ignoring appropriations, or redirecting large foreign/ private money to sustain operations – exactly the sort of conduct already flagged as impeachable in current resolutions.
  • Impact: C and E move together; watch whether conservative media treats it as a scandal or as business as usual.

• Open non‑compliance with court orders

  • The White House explicitly continuing a policy after an adverse Supreme Court or nationwide injunction.
  • Impact: One of the clearest red lines for elite Republicans and the judiciary; a genuine defiance episode is where you lift your systemic‑shock and impeachment weights meaningfully, not just by a point or two.

12.5 Build a Personal “Trump Tenure Dashboard”

To keep all of this from turning into noise, formalize it:

• Panel 1 – Markets: Track daily prices for:

  • Anchor “Trump president on Dec 31, 2025?”
  • Impeachment‑only lines (2025 and term‑long)
  • Any 25th‑, health‑, and political‑violence contracts.

• Panel 2 – Event log: Simple table with columns:
  date | event | category (legal / political / health / systemic) | scenario bucket(s) touched | expected sign & size.
  Force yourself to write: “+3 pts to E, −2 pts to C” before trading.

• Panel 3 – Pre‑planned playbooks:

  • Example rules: “Two Cabinet resignations in 30 days → add 5 pts to B/E, buy +3c of out‑by‑2025”; “Single viral health clip with no medical corroboration → sell up to 2c of 25th markets, flat tenure.”

The aim is not to predict the exact path, but to ensure that every trade in Trump‑2025 risk is anchored to a specific, updated view of which pathway you’re really betting on—and which concrete events would make you change your mind.

All of that machinery—scenario trees, linked contracts, dashboards—is in service of one awkward fact: a ~50% Trump‑out‑by‑2025 price is both startling and not obviously insane. It clashes with the long U.S. record of presidents finishing their terms and with Trump’s current “fully fit to serve” health data, yet it becomes at least partially rational once you fold in structural polarization, legal overhang, and small but real systemic‑risk tails.

The first discipline is to separate history from hype. Historically, early exits have been about death and assassination, not clever constitutional maneuvers. Modern medicine has pushed natural‑death risk for a man like Trump into low single digits over a one‑year horizon, and post‑JFK security has sharply reduced realized assassination risk. On the other side, the supposedly “easy” coup tools—25th Amendment §4 and bipartisan Senate conviction—are, in practice, the hardest levers to pull, requiring a level of intra‑GOP revolt we didn’t see even after January 6.[^brennan][^brookings25]

Traders should therefore weight those cinematic paths lightly unless something fundamental changes in health or GOP politics. The realistic tail is dominated instead by more prosaic channels:

• Health shocks and age‑related actuarial risk, still likely a single‑digit slice of the composite price, but the cleanest to quantify.[^trumpphysical]
• Negotiated or face‑saving exits, if legal and institutional pressure ever converge strongly enough that resignation is the least‑bad option for Trump and Republican elites.
• Impeachment as a contributor, not the core, given markets that still price long‑term impeachment odds well below the tenure line and the high bar for 67 Senate votes.[^kalshi][^poly]
• A residual systemic‑shock bucket—constitutional standoffs, defiance of court orders, or serious political violence—grounded in the deteriorating but still high‑capacity stability scores the U.S. now posts on FSI, V‑Dem, and conflict watchlists.[^fsi][^icg]

The second discipline is probabilistic humility. No spreadsheet will pin “the” true odds on any of these branches. What you can do is:

• Work in ranges, not point estimates.
• Tie every position to a scenario tree you can explain in one page.
• Update that tree only when new evidence—a Supreme Court ruling, a real health event, visible elite defection—actually shifts a branch, rather than because Twitter did.

If you treat the Trump‑2025 line as a one‑off gamble on a single personality, you’ll be whipsawed by narratives that insist early exit is either inevitable or unthinkable. If you treat it as a live case study in how prediction markets digest complex institutional risk, you get something more durable: a framework you can reuse whenever a democracy puts extreme stress on its own succession rules.

That’s ultimately the edge here. Not squeezing the last cent out of whether Trump is in the chair at 23:59 on December 31, 2025, but learning to price tail risk without buying the hype—so that the next time markets flash 50/50 on a constitutional stress test, you know how to read the tape instead of just reacting to it.