Okay, so what if Trump dies?
I have news for you about the news. Right now, there are obituaries written with Donald Trump as the titular character. The New York Times has a prepared obituary. So does the Washington Post and the New York Post. They all want to be the first to tell you that Trump is dead.
This is not an anti-Trump fake news media thing, they have an obituary prepared for Biden too. And one for Mitch McConnell and Chuck Grassley and Harrison Ford and Dick Durbin. Gay Talese — another man who surely has a pre-written obituary anticipating his death, at least in the Times — once wrote that there is “nothing worse for an obituary writer than to have a world figure die before his obituary is up-to-date.”
Talese wrote that a decade-and-a-half before 24-hour-news and the internet. Things move a lot faster now. There are push notifications and 🚨BREAKING 🚨tweets and YouTube Live™ and Trump dies, all these mechanisms will be triggered immediately.
Those same mechanisms will also be deployed if Biden dies; but a Biden death is hardly an interesting scenario. There’s a vice president and, believe it or not, there are even structured Democratic campaigns waiting for a green light. Some you know about, some you don’t. The American political system is prepared for the death of a president. It is not, however, prepared for the death of a man who has turned his party into a cult of personality.
When the leader of a personality cult dies, a power vacuum opens. Things can go south immediately. It happened in Russia’s Time of Troubles and again after the death of Stalin. This was the central parody of the movie, Death of Stalin. I’m thinking particularly of the funeral scene where they’re all playing power games and Khrushchev is trying to get the prime spot. (which, spoiler, he eventually attained in the end)
Just like in Stalin’s case, if Trump dies suddenly, there’s going to be a power-grabbing scramble at the funeral. And it’s probably going to be just as comical. Kevin McCarthy elbowing people out of the way so he can sit within the camera shot. Lindsey Graham will cry. Lauren Boebert will give somebody an over-the-pants handjob. Kimberly Guilfoyle will probably give a rage-eulogy and be paid handsomely for it.
Here’s where the Trump kids get their power — they get to control who speaks at the funeral. Or at least, they should make that demand. Don Jr. will try to carry the torch but he won’t get too far. Trump the elder is at least able to sell the lie that he’s self-made. He even invented — and then successfully sold — the ludicrous notion of the blue collar billionaire. Everybody knows that Don Jr. is a rich kid, no matter how many videos he posts of him deadlifting1.
Of course, if this — the eventual and inevitable death — happens after Trump is re-elected into the White House, it’s all standard business. The Vice President becomes the president. I doubt Trump’s eventual VP pick will be able to hold onto his base (see: Mike Pence) but he/she will have the remainder of the term to try.
There’s only one Trump — you can’t out-Trump him. You can’t steal his gimmick (see: Ron DeSantis). And yet, the reliable thing about a power vacuum, is that every hopeful successor always tries to occupy the exact same podium occupied by the deceased leader. They will dive deeper into Trumpism, trying to pick the sweet spot between nationalistic and openly racist. But, again, nobody seems able to walk that balancing act except Trump himself.
In 1762, Catherine the Great2 seized control of the Russian monarchy from her husband, Peter III. Soon after, Peter III was killed. And soon after that, a number of pretenders claimed a right to the throne, all of them saying they were Peter III. The most famous was a cossack named Yemelyan Pugachev, who — and I’m quoting Wikipedia here — caged his pretender rebellion “against a background of profound peasant unrest and war with the Ottoman Empire.”
Does that sound at all familiar? Unrest within the lower-middle classes? An unpopular foreign war? It would not take all that much for a fake Trump to sprout up out of some deep-red place like rural West Virginia. He does the voice and that penguin thing with his hands, says “I’m still Trump, I’m not dead — did you really think I could just die? They only pretended to bury me. It’s all a deep state plot.”
You might say, come on, nobody could be that gullible. Nobody could buy into such absurd and obviously motivated lies. But really? We are not far-removed from the era of Pizzagate and Qanon. Probably, we’re still in it. A quarter of Americans believe that the FBI instigated the January 6th Insurrection. I was walking through Jackson Hole last week and I saw a Trump/JFK Jr. campaign sign. You can buy one on Amazon. They have five-star reviews. It’s not actually going to be that hard to convince these people that Trump is still alive and, for some reason, he sounds curiously like Alec Baldwin.
No, but of course, Alec Baldwin wouldn’t work. He hasn’t talked to a Trump voter in twenty years. He doesn’t know how they think. But what about that construction worker from Long Island? He could pull it off. You’d need somebody with A.) a veritable Trump impression and B.) a raw desire for power at any cost; which again, should tie in nicely to the aforementioned Trump impression.
Oh, if you’re pretending to be Trump, you’ve got to get certain people on board, sure. But you get Bannon and Stephen Miller, Charlie Kirk and a few people at CPAC and you’re good. They’re not too hard to swing — you just promise them isolationism, nationalism and access to power.
So what happens if Trump dies? Utter stupidity, anti-immigrant rhetoric and a degradation of the already staggering republic. Basically the same thing we’ve been getting for eight years. The rough truth of it is that Trump changed America, he pushed the Overton Window into a new place. And, even after Trump, America isn’t going to change.
Donald Trump Jr’s deadlifting form is laughably bad, you can tell this guy never actually had to spend any time in a weight room.
I’m sorry I’m basing so much of this on Russian history, but A.) I’ve got a thing for Russian history and B.) there’s not exactly a precedent for the death of a political cult leader in American history.