Komm, Trümpentod
By 
Cookies served to passengers on July 3, 2026, on special luxury 747 gifted by Qatar to Donald Trump
On my Michigan football message board, a poster has posted the same message every day now for several months. It consists of the following sentence: “Today may be the day that it happens.” He has never explained this message, but everyone knows what it means, which among other things demonstrates that the analytical philosophical distinction between sentence meaning and utterance meaning is stupid (because sentence meaning is a thing that does not and cannot exist).
Anyway, the possibility of a president, present or former or both, dying on July 4th is an interesting mathematical problem, which I’m sure many of you can figure out in short order. Let us consider:
(1) This is a morbid variation on the famous birthday paradox, which reveals that you only need 23 people in a random group for the odds of at least two of them to share the same birthday to climb above 50%. Now of course the question as stated is much more complicated, because it’s not “what are the odds that X number of presidents will share the same death day?” but “what are the odds that X number of presidents will have died on July 4th,” which are astronomically higher.
(2) Fun fact: Three of the first five presidents did in fact die on July 4th: Adams and Jefferson famously on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and James Monroe five years later. The ex ante odds of this happening are like several gajillons to one. Consider that the odds that at least three of a random group of five people will share the same birthday — that’s any day in the year — are 13,300 to one against. And that’s any of 365 days. So . . . yeah.
(4) My same handy dandy calculator says that the odds that at least four out of forty-five random people (there have been forty-five persons who have been president) sharing the same death day are 357 to 1 against. And again, that’s ANY day, not July 4th. A complication here is that five of those forty-five haven’t died yet, but my brain hurts already.
Komm, Trümpentod.
This is the first line of a prayer in German, written by Christian von Hummelich-Gottlieb Spengler (of Ulm). I will translate the entire text for the upcoming National Day of Prayer for Trümpentod, the exact date of which is still to be determined, as I am consulting with, among others, the DSA, Joaquin Guzman Loera, Hunter Biden, and the fourth line of the 1976 Philadelphia Flyers.