The Death of Stalin — or, How Trump’s America Will Eat Itself
His death will not free America; it will only unmask the scavengers who fattened on his reign.
The Death of Stalin — A Harbinger of Trump’s Aftermath
There’s a film you should watch now, before it turns from satire into prophecy: Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017). On the surface it is a farce about the Soviet politburo scrambling to seize power after the dictator’s sudden demise. Scratch the laughter, though, and you see the anatomy of authoritarian succession: backstabbing, cowardice, sycophancy, and the grotesque theater of men who served the tyrant now pretending they were always his equal.
Replace Moscow with Washington, 1953 with 2025-or-so, and you begin to see the problem. Trump’s death - whenever it comes, and mortality is the one term limit no man can cheat - will not end Trumpism. It will trigger a scramble. His heirs, cronies, and opportunists, from Mar-a-Lago courtiers to Capitol Hill clowns, will claw at the rotting throne. The MAGA movement, like Stalin’s inner circle, is a coalition of people too cowardly to challenge the leader in life and too greedy to let go of his corpse in death.
The Iannucci’s film is famously “inaccurate,” as many historians have pointed out. And the director himself admits: It’s not a documentary, it’s a fiction inspired by the truth of what it must have felt like at the time. But that’s the point. Feelings matter more than facts in the shadow of tyrants. The paranoia, the absurdity, the desperate improvisation of men caught without their master — that is the truth. That is what the death of a despot looks like, whether in Kremlin halls or gilded Mar-A-Lago golf resort.
In The Death of Stalin, ministers argue over the dictator’s body while doctors, prisoners, and generals are used as disposable props in the performance of power. In Washington, expect the same: sycophants competing for inheritance rights, rivals leaking kompromat, children feuding over the golden calf, and media hagiographers producing a gospel before the embalming fluid has dried. Trump will not get a state funeral; he’ll get a blood sport, with Fox News as the ring announcer.
See the film. Laugh at the chaos. Then look again — and recognize that the comedy is a dress rehearsal. When Trump finally goes, America will learn that the death of a strongman is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning of the brawl over his bones.
“The Death of Trump will not be the end of an era — it will be the beginning of the wake,
and America will discover that the corpse has more heirs than the kingdom has crowns.”
The Obituarist
In our next article - Obituarist’s casting call: The Death of Stalin: The MAGA Remake. we will present each figure in Trump’s orbit mapped onto their Soviet doppelgänger in Iannucci’s film (and history).