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.

List of contents

.- A Thousand Unexpected Ways.
.- Wither Republic.
.- Two Conditions.
.- To Keep the Republic.
.- The Instrumentalization of Death.
.- The Subversion of Procedural Contingency.
.- Pace Death.

Product details

• Authors: Dean Caivano
• Publisher: Springer, Berlin
• Languages: English, German
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Release: 24.07.2025
• EAN: 9783031947285
• ISBN: 978-3-0-3194728-5
• No. of pages: 62
• Dimensions: 155 mm x 5 mm x 235 mm
• Weight: 131 g
• Illustrations: XIII, 62 p.
• Series: SpringerBriefs in Political Science
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Political science > Comparative and international political science; Amerika, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Geschichte: Ereignisse und Themen, Vergleichende Politikwissenschaften, Trumpism, Open Access, Political Theory, auseinandersetzen, Political History, Comparative Politics, Electoral Politics, American Politics, Wahlen und Volksabstimmungen / Wahlrecht, Politikwissenschaft und politische Theorie, far-right politics, constitutional rot, republican decline, institutional corruption, democratic erosion, necro-president, governance collapse, MAGA rhetoric, institutional decay, Republican theory