Open Access 2025 | Open Access | Buch

The Necro-President

Trump, MAGA, and the Decline of the American Republic

verfasst von: Dean Caivano

Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buchreihe : SpringerBriefs in Political Science

Enthalten in: Springer Professional "Wirtschaft+Technik" , Springer Professional "Wirtschaft"

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Über dieses Buch

Dieser Brief entwickelt den Nekro-Präsidenten als eine Figur, durch die der Zusammenbruch des politischen Lebens in Amerika sichtbar wird. In unserem gegenwärtigen Moment politischer Umwälzungen spiegelt der Nekro-Präsident wider, wie der Tod, nicht das Gesetz oder das Volk, die Bedeutung der Präsidentschaft geprägt hat. Das Amt, das einst als Quelle der Vitalität und des demokratischen Versprechens gedacht war, signalisiert heute Erschöpfung, Spektakel und symbolischen Verfall. Der Necro-Präsident konzentriert sich auf die Wahl 2024 und zeigt, wie Joe Biden und Donald Trump zwei Seiten einer kollabierenden Republik repräsentierten. Biden, der als Gespensterfigur besetzt war, wurde zu einem Symbol der Entropie und des Niedergangs. Trump dagegen positionierte sich als Auferstehungskämpfer, als messianischer Führer, der den Verfall überwinden und die Republik retten könnte. Was folgte, war nicht die Rückkehr des Lebens in die Präsidentschaft, sondern die Normalisierung des Todes als Herrschaftsform. Diese kritische philosophische Intervention geht über Debatten über demokratische Erosion und Verfassungskrise hinaus. Sie fragt, was passiert, wenn das politische Leben weitergeht, auch nachdem die Symbole, die ihm einst Bedeutung verliehen haben, hohl geworden sind. Dieses Buch ist frei zugänglich.

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Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

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Chapter 1. A Thousand Unexpected Ways

Abstract

I introduce the concept of the necro-president as a figure and condition that emerges at the intersection of institutional decay, symbolic death, and political myth. Framed through the 2024 presidential election, I argue that Joseph R. Biden functions as entropy, a spectral embodiment of decline, while Donald J. Trump operates as necro-sovereign. This figure reclaims decay through spectacle and mythic restoration. Drawing from the republican tradition’s concern with fragility and collapse, I show how the presidency has shifted from a symbol of vitality to a vessel of exhaustion. The necro-president offers a lens for theorizing the unraveling of symbolic authority and the transformation of executive power during political decline.

Dean Caivano

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Chapter 2. Wither Republic

Abstract

I examine how republican theory, both classical and contemporary, wrestles with the inevitability of decay. I argue that two existential conditions define the republican project: institutional inevitability and procedural contingency. These twin logics reflect the awareness of regime mortality and the design of mechanisms intended to delay collapse. Drawing from a rich tradition of thinkers, including Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Madison, I trace how decline is encoded into republican architecture, from ancient succession planning to modern fears of populism and institutional rot. This chapter reframes republicanism not as a solution to crisis, but as a system built to manage it, a structure of ephemeral permanence calibrated to metabolize corruption, failure, and mortality. I show how neoliberalism, authoritarian nostalgia, and spectacle politics have eroded these stabilizing devices, making space for the necro-president to emerge, not as a rupture but as a symptom of the republican body’s exhaustion.

Dean Caivano

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Chapter 3. To Keep the Republic

Abstract

I examine how the figure of the necro-president takes shape through three interrelated conditions of republican decline: constitutional anxiety around succession, the instrumentalization of death as a governing tool, and the collapse of procedural legitimacy, following the January 6, 2021, insurrection. These sites expose how the presidency has become a stage for symbolic decay, institutional fragility, and sovereign performance. In this chapter, I argue that the 2024 presidential campaign marked a new framing of Trump’s messianic return—one that exceeded the restoration of law and instead emphasized resurrection as the condition for saving the republic. I explore how rhetoric, ritual, and spectacle were mobilized throughout the campaign to reclaim death as a source of vitality and to cast Trump as the only force capable of preventing the republic’s final collapse.

Dean Caivano

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Chapter 4. The Necro-President

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that the figure of the necro-president reaches its full articulation during the 2024 election cycle, where political spectacle, institutional decay, and symbolic death converge into a new logic of rule. I track how Biden’s presidency became a site of projected mortality, and how Trump’s campaign transformed death into a political resource, used not only to delegitimize opposition but to cast himself as a messianic figure capable of resurrecting the republic. I weave insights from Arendt, Han, Lefort, Benjamin, Derrida, and Anderson to frame death as a material force shaping contemporary governance. I argue that death becomes the mechanism through which authority is asserted, institutions are hollowed out, and legitimacy is claimed. The necro-president is not just a figure of decline. He is a structure of rule built through decay.

Dean Caivano

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Chapter 5. Pace Death

Abstract

In this chapter, I argue that the fantasy of a permanent American republic is central to the necro-political condition. From executive orders to campaign rhetoric, Trump’s aesthetic project attempts to construct a vision of national permanence through architecture, symbolism, and spectacle. These efforts reanimate fascist imaginaries under the guise of national renewal, framing political decay as divine restoration. I argue that death is no longer understood as the republic’s eventual limit but is absorbed into its governing logic, shaping how permanence, power, and legitimacy are imagined. I advance an ethic of acting with death as a way to confront decline, not as failure, but as a condition of political life. This commitment insists on the urgency of building differently, inhabiting collapse without replicating it, and imagining life within and against the inevitability of loss.

Dean Caivano

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Titel: The Necro-President
verfasst von: Dean Caivano
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland
Electronic ISBN: 978-3-031-94729-2
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-94728-5
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-94729-2