The Necro-President: Trump, Maga, and the Decline of the American Republic

This Brief develops the necro-president as a figure through which the collapse of American political life becomes visible. In our present moment of political upheaval, the necro-president reflects how death, not law or the people, has come to shape the meaning of the presidency.

The office, once imagined as a source of vitality and democratic promise, now signals exhaustion, spectacle, and symbolic decay. Focusing on the 2024 election, The Necro-President shows how Joe Biden and Donald Trump came to represent two sides of a collapsing republic. Biden, cast as a spectral figure, became a symbol of entropy and decline. Trump, by contrast, positioned himself as a resurrectionist, a messianic leader who could overcome decay and save the republic. What followed was not the return of life to the presidency but the normalization of death as a mode of rule.

This critical philosophical intervention moves beyond debates about democratic erosion and constitutional crisis. It asks what happens when political life continues even after the symbols that once gave it meaning have gone hollow.

This book is open access.

Dean Caivano is a political theorist specializing in American political thought and radical democracy. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Lehigh University. He is the author of A Politics of All: Thomas Jefferson and Radical Democracy (Lexington Books, 2023) and co-author of The Sublime of the Political: Narrative & Autoethnography as Theory (transcript Verlag & Columbia University Press, 2021). His scholarship has appeared in journals such as Philosophy & Social Criticism, New Political Science, and the Journal of Narrative Politics.