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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.

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Let me put some of that classical education to work, and spin the wheels of the wayback machine to imperial Rome, where they workshopped the strongman genre two thousand years before Trump ever picked up a Sharpie or a Big Mac.

When Nero killed himself in 68 AD, there was no chance of a smooth handoff. I'm sure Romans thought, "Hey, finally ... Emperor Loco is gone and things will settle down.

Nope. The empire plunged into the "Year of the Four Emperors," a twelve-month blender in which Galba, Otho, Vitellius, and finally Vespasian took turns claiming the purple, whacking rivals, and playing the game to its bloody hilt.

Each had troops, money, and a story about why he was the true heir of Augustus. The Praetorian Guard switched sides, provincial legions proclaimed their own favorites, and loyalty to Nero's sacred person evaporated in about five minutes.

For years, Rome had told itself that the emperor was the living embodiment of the state. Statues, ceremonies, language of divinity, the whole package. The moment he was gone, all that mystique converted back into raw math: who can pay the soldiers, feed the mob, and keep his neck out of the executioner's hands.

That is the first hard lesson. The louder a system insists that only one man can embody the nation, the less prepared it is for the day that man disappears. The court that spent years flattering him is suddenly full of men who see an empty chair they crave beyond words and reason.

Roll forward a millennium and change the costumes. The dynamic is the same.

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In medieval and early-modern Europe, the death of a king was less a constitutional process than a high-stakes reality show. Every court had its factions around sons, nephews, queens, favorites, and warlords. The Wars of the Roses in England were one long, bloody reminder that once "divine right" is attached to a bloodline instead of an office, every cousin with a sword and a herald (the medieval equivalent of a TikTok influencer on staff) has an argument for the throne.

The Ottomans solved this problem their own way. New sultans often began their reign by quietly strangling their brothers, because they understood exactly what ambitious princelings do once the old man is gone. "Succession planning," in that context, meant the Court Strangler had a job to do.

Strip the tapestry and incense away and you see a familiar pattern. Everyone closest to the throne claims perfect loyalty while the king is strong. Everyone closest to the throne also runs an internal calculation about what happens after his last breath. They are not there by accident. They got close because they like power, and they plan to keep it.

The twentieth century dressed the same story in ideological uniforms and party titles.

Stalin's death in 1953 did not produce a smooth, dignified transition to the next "wise leader of the working class."

It produced a cage match in the Politburo. Stalin left no clear successor, only a terror machine and a room full of men who had survived him by being ruthless and cautious in equal measure.

History may not repeat itself exactly, but often times it sure does rhyme.