When Trump Dies

Every aging dictator, every long-in-the-tooth autocrat, every once-terrifying strongman eventually feels the cold hand of Death reaching out to tap them on the shoulder and whisper, “It’s time.”

We all understand mortality. It’s the constant of the human condition, the endless winner of billions of lives, even that of the Dear Leaders whose rule seemed eternal.

We don’t spend enough time on how much chaos and blood comes after that tap in the Generallismo’s shoulder, on the inevitable collapse of systems built around a single man entail.

The leader dies, weakens, is defeated politically or militarily, or even loses a step, and the entire structure that pretended to be a unified movement reveals itself as what it really was all along: a feeding frenzy for sycophants who think they were born to inherit the throne. The pressure cooker of autocratic systems rewards fealty, loyalty, public and private obeisance.

If you want to understand what is coming for MAGA as Donald Trump ages and declines, you start there.

Not with his tweets, not with daily outrages and excesses, but with the iron law of personality cults: succession is their unsolved problem.

Autocrats are very good at seizing power and holding it. They are very bad at leaving it behind without blowing something up on the way out. Political scientists have long argued that personality cult regimes are especially fragile at succession because the leader spends his life eliminating rivals rather than training successors.

Trump is not unique. He is just the latest in an ancient story...