4 ACUMEN • SPRING 2026 understood: “The sense of decay and rot that is associated with death or a corpse has actually infiltrated the highest office in the land.” In late July 2024, elected representatives demanded proof of life from Biden. Rep. Lauren Boebert’s insistence that Biden provide “proof of life” by 5 p.m. became a viral moment. “This is distinct from demanding a death certificate or an autopsy report,” Caivano explains. “What that really suggests is that we are now living in the type of culture and society where we need to demonstrate our very own existence.” After Trump’s return to the White House, the administration replaced Biden’s presidential portrait with a framed photograph of an autopen, the mechanical device used to replicate signatures. “We have the normalization of not being there. We have the normalization of the lack of vitality, the lack of presence, the lack of life,” Caivano says. The presidency has always represented American vitality while also wielding death through commanderin-chief authority. The crisis emerges when this symbol loses coherence. “What happens when that singular figure has become so hollowed out that it’s devoid of meaning?” If Biden embodied institutional death, Trump positioned himself as POLITICAL SCIENCE THE NECROPRESIDENT When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis compared President Joe Biden to the corpse from “Weekend at Bernie’s” at the 2024 Republican National Convention, the crowd erupted in laughter. But for Dean Caivano, the joke exposed something far more disturbing—it revealed that death itself had infiltrated the symbolic center of American governance. “Really he was touching upon something that lies at the very heart of all political systems, but particularly a republican regime like ours,” says Caivano, assistant professor of political science. “And that is the question of what comes next.” In “The NecroPresident: Trump, MAGA, and the Decline of the American Republic,” Caivano introduces a provocative framework for understanding the 2024 presidential election, not as a typical contest between candidates, but as a referendum on whether the American republic retains any vitality at all. His central concept, the “necropresident,” describes how mortality and decay have become embedded in the language, symbols, and psychology of contemporary American politics. According to Caivano, DeSantis was “speaking to this very real threat and this undercurrent, this psychological anxiety that we feel about maybe there won’t be a tomorrow.” The anxiety has empirical support: “We have data that supports the fact that this is the first time in a hundred years where people over 50 don’t think the future will be as promising for their children as it was for them.” DeSantis’ comparison pointed to something the crowd intuitively ANADOLU / GETTY IMAGES resurrection. “There is a very strong [group of people] that has merged the presidency with a messianic Christian white nationalist figure,” Caivano notes. This creates a theological paradox. Trump promises an eternal republic, but Christian eschatology requires governmental collapse for Christ’s return. “Trump supporters are caught placing all their faith into this singular mortal man to save the present moment. But in doing so, it may foreclose the possibility of a Christian kingdom coming into the future,” he says. The necro-president is not an aberration but a symptom—the visible manifestation of institutional hollowing underway for decades, Caivano says. Biden’s frailty became a screen for collective anxieties about republican mortality, while Trump’s messianic framing offered the fantasy of transcending decay through authoritarian permanence. Neither resolves the crisis, he adds, but both confirm it. HISTORY AMERICA’S FIRST BESTSELLER SCANDAL Historian Monica Najar has spent years unraveling one of the most sensational stories in American publishing history—the tale of Maria Monk, whose lurid 1836 account of convent life became a 19th-century bestseller. It told shocking stories of sexual assault, murder and abuse inside a Montreal convent, fueling antiCatholic sentiment for generations. But Monk, a 19-year-old pregnant woman who arrived in the United States from Montreal, was most likely THE HBURMIEAFNSITIES In the Presidential Walk of Fame outside the Oval Office, former President Joe Biden’s portrait has been replaced by a photo of an autopen.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTA0OTQ5OA==