A dictator can die of illness or old age.   

But there are other ways a tyrant can be forced to give up power—such as Gaius Caligula, Adolf Hitler and—possibly—Joseph Stalin.

Joseph Stalin ruled as absolute dictator of the Soviet Union from January 21, 1924, to March 5, 1953—29 years.

Joseph Stalin

Throughout his nearly 30-year reign over the Soviet Union, at least 20 million men, women and children died—from executions, deportations, imprisonment in Gulag camps, and a man-made famine through the forced collection of harvests.

Robert Payne, the acclaimed British historian, vividly portrayed the crimes of this murderous tyrant in his brilliant 1965 biography, The Rise and Fall of Stalin. 

According to Payne, Stalin was planning yet another purge during the last weeks of his life. This would be “a holocaust greater than any he had planned before.

“This time there would be a chistka [purge] to end all chistkas, a purging of the entire body of the state from top to bottom. No one, not even the highest officials, was to be spared.” 

Then, on March 4, 1953, Moscow Radio announced: “During the night of March 1-2, while in his Moscow apartment, Comrade Stalin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage affecting vital areas of the brain.”

Stalin died on March 5, 1953. He was 73 and in poor health from a lifetime of smoking, drinking and little exercise.

But he could have died of unnatural causes.

In the 2004 book, Stalin’s Last Crime, Vladimir P. Naumov, a Russian historian, and Jonathan Brent, a Yale University Soviet scholar, assert that he might have been poisoned.

If this happened, the occasion was during a final dinner with four members of the Politburo. Two of these were Lavrenti P. Beria, chief of the secret police, and Nikita S. Khrushchev, who eventually succeeded Stalin.

The authors believe that, if Stalin was poisoned, the most likely suspect was Beria. The method: Slipping warfarin, a tasteless and colorless blood thinner also used as a rat killer, into his glass of wine.

In Nikita Khrushchev’s 1970 memoirs, he quotes Beria as telling Vyacheslav M. Molotov, another Politburo member, two months after Stalin’s death: “I did him in! I saved all of you.”

It’s entirely possible that Donald Trump’s “Presidency-for-Life” may end by natural causes.

He’s 79, and despite his repeated boastings that he’s the healthiest President in United States history, clearly he isn’t.

He is grotesquely overweight, doesn’t exercise, falls asleep in public appearances and slurs his words. Much of his diet consists of greasy, artery-clogging fast food—such as from McDonald’s and KFC.

He stays up late at night, pouring out his hatred for countless real and imagined enemies on his website, Truth Social. 

But that is not the only way his reign could disappear.

Since retaking office on January 20, Trump has ruled as de-facto dictator. Among his outrages. 

• Turning Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into his personal Gestapo. Nearly 150,000 people—both illegal aliens and American-born citizens—were arrested between January and late July 2025. 
• Purging FBI agents who rightly investigated his illegally confiscating classified documents and inciting the January 6, 2021 attack on Congress.
• Attacking CBS and ABC for their news departments’ accurately covering his litany of mistakes and crimes.
• Ordering the Justice Department to indict former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James for carrying out their legal responsibilities.
• Forcing ABC to (temporarily) cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live! because the comedian made jokes about him.
• Shutting down the Federal Government over Democrats’ refusal to back his gutting of Medicare and the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to give tax breaks to billionaires.

On June 14, more than five million Americans protested Trump’s rule with a “No Kings” march. And nearly seven million participated in the October 18 march. More are planned.   

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Niccolo Machiavelli, the father of modern political science, offers a stern warning for Trump—a warning he has steadfastly ignored.

Niccolo Machiavelli

In his masterwork, The Discourses on Livy, Machiavelli notes how important it is for rulers to make themselves loved—or at least respected—by their fellow citizens: 

“Note how much more praise those Emperors merited who, after Rome became an empire, conformed to her laws like good princes, than those who took the opposite course. 

“Titus, Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus and Marcus Auelius did not require the Praetorians nor the multitudinous legions to defend them, because they were protected by their own good conduct, the good will of the people, and by the love of the Senate.

“On the other hand, neither the Eastern nor the Western armies saved Caligula, Nero, Vitellius and so many other wicked Emperors from the enemies which their bad conduct and evil lives had raised up against them.” 

In his better-known work, The Prince, Machiavelli warns rulers who—like Donald Trump–are inclined to rule by fear:

“A prince should make himself feared in such a way that if he does not gain love, he at any rate avoids hatred: for fear and the absence of hatred may well go together.” 

By Machiavelli’s standards, Trump has made himself the perfect target for a conspiracy:

“When a prince becomes universally hated, it is likely that he’s harmed some individuals—who thus seek revenge. This desire is increased by seeing that the prince is widely loathed.”

A dictator can die of illness or old age.      

But there are other ways a tyrant can be forced to give up power—such as the following three.

First up: Gaius Caligula, the “Mad Emperor” of Imperial Rome.

Caligula soon recovered but emerged a changed man. He began claiming to be a god, and killing or exiling anyone he saw as a threat. He ordered his victims tortured to death with many slight wounds: “Strike so that he may feel that he is dying.” 

Among his litany of crimes, according to his biographer, Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus:

“He forced parents to attend the executions of their sons, sending a litter for one man who pleaded ill health, and inviting another to dinner immediately after witnessing the death, and trying to rouse him to gaiety and jesting by a great show of affability.”

For all his cruelty and egomania, the trait that finally destroyed Caligula was his joy in humiliating others.

His fatal mistake was to taunt Cassius Chaerea, a member of his own bodyguard. Caligula considered Chaerea effeminate because of a weak voice and mocked him with names like “Priapus” and “Venus.”

On January 22 41 A.D. Chaerea and several other bodyguards hacked Caligula to death with swords before other guards could save him.

Next up: Adolf Hitler, dictator of Nazi Germany from January 30, 1933, to April 30, 1945—12 years.

He was born on April 20, 1889, in Braunau am Inn in Austria-Hungary.

Adolf Hitler

He was appointed Chancellor—chief law enforcement officer—of Germany on January 30, 1933, by President Paul von Hindenburg. Upon Hindenburg’s death in 1934, Hitler assumed the Presidency and established himself as absolute dictator. 

From 1933 to 1939 he presided over Germany’s rapid economic recovery from the Great Depression, the defiance of restrictions imposed on Germany after World War 1, and the annexation of Austria and Czechoslovakia, where millions of ethnic Germans lived. 

These accomplishments won him widespread popular support. 

But after absorbing Czechoslovakia in 1938, Hitler felt himself invincible. On September 1, 1939, his armies attacked Poland—and unintentionally ignited World War II. 

After conquering Norway, Denmark, Holland, Belgium, France, Greece and Yugoslavia, he made his two greatest mistakes of the war: He invaded the far more powerful Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and declared war on the equally more powerful United States on December 11.

Parallel to unleashing a war that slaughtered 50 million people, Hitler orchestrated the extermination of at least six million Jews during the Holocaust.

By April, 1945, Germany faced destruction from the advancing Russians on the East, and from the advancing Americans on the West. 

On April 30, with Russian forces only blocks from his underground bunker, Hitler lifted a heavy 7.65mm Walther PPK pistol to his right temple, bit on a cyanide capsule, and pulled the trigger.

Just as Caligula’s mangled remains were hastily burned and buried in the Horti Lamiani gardens, Hitler’s body was hastily cremated in the Reich Chancellery garden. 

Last up: Joseph Stalin, dictator of the Soviet Union from January 21, 1924, to March 5, 1953—29 years.

Born on December 18, 1878, in Georgia, Russia, he hated Czarist rule and in 1903 joined the Communist Bolsheviks party, led by Vladimir Lenin, to overthrow it.

Joseph Stalin

On November 7, 1917, Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government, which had taken power in February, after Czarist rule collapsed.  

Stalin became a member of the new Soviet government, gradually working his way to the position of General Secretary. When Lenin died on January 21, 1924, Stalin outmaneuvered Leon Trotsky, his major rival for the succession, and became absolute dictator.

Starting in 1934, a series of massive purges followed—most notably between August, 1936, and March, 1938.

Throughout his nearly 30-year reign over the Soviet Union, at least 20 million men, women and children died—from executions, deportations, imprisonment in Gulag camps, and a man-made famine through the forced collection of harvests.

Robert Payne, the acclaimed British historian, vividly portrayed the crimes of this murderous tyrant in his brilliant 1965 biography, The Rise and Fall of Stalin. 

According to Payne, Stalin was planning yet another purge during the last weeks of his life. This would be “a holocaust greater than any he had planned before. 

“This time there would be a chistka [purge] to end all chistkas, a purging of the entire body of the state from top to bottom. No one, not even the highest officials, was to be spared.” 

Yet Stalin did nothing to calm their fears. He often summoned his “comrades” to the Kremlin for late-night drinking bouts, where he freely humiliated them. 

Long before he took office for the first time on January 20, 2017, Donald Trump never intended to rule as an ordinary President. 

Under the Constitution, a President can hold office for—at most—eight years. But a “President-for-Life” can rule until he dies.

That was—and remains—his ambition.

In a closed-door speech to Republican donors on March 3, 2018, Trump revealed his ultimate intention: To overthrow America’s constitutional government.   

He praised China’s President, Xi Jinping, for recently assuming full dictatorial powers: “He’s now president for life. President for life. No, he’s great. And look, he was able to do that. I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot some day.” 

The statement was greeted with cheers and laughter by Republican donors.

Xi Jinping

Upon taking office as the Nation’s 45th President, Trump attacked or undermined one public or private institution after another.

Among these:

• American Intelligence: Even before taking office, Trump refused to accept the findings of the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) that Russian Intelligence agents had intervened in the 2016 election to ensure his victory.
• “I think it’s ridiculous,” he told “Fox News Sunday.” “I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it….No, I don’t believe it at all.”   
• And when FBI Director James Comey dared to pursue a probe into “the Russia thing,” Trump fired him without warning. 
• American law enforcement agencies: Trump repeatedly attacked his own Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, for not “protecting” him from agents pursuing the Russia investigation.
• On November 8, 2018, Trump abruptly fired him, following Democrats’ winning control of the House in the midterm elections.
• He threatened to fire Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general, who oversaw Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian subversion of the 2016 election. 
• American military agencies: In 2018, Trump refused to visit an American cemetery near Paris  and referred to U.S. Marines buried there as “losers” and “suckers.”  
• Trump regularly abused military officials, calling Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley a “dumbass” and former Secretary of Defense James Mattis “the world’s most overrated general.”

Seal of the Department of Defense

• The press: On February 17, 2017, Trump tweeted: “The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!”
• Appearing before the Conservative Political Action Conference on February 24, 2017, Trump said: “I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It’s fake, phony, fake….I’m against the people that make up stories and make up sources. They shouldn’t be allowed to use sources unless they use somebody’s name. Let their name be put out there.” 
• The judiciary: Trump repeatedly attacked Seattle US District Judge James Robart, who halted Trump’s first Muslim travel ban. 
• In one tweet, Trump claimed: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”  
• At Trump’s bidding, White House aide Stephen Miller attacked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals: “We have a judiciary that has taken far too much power and become, in many cases, a supreme branch of government.”

Donald Trump

Even after leaving the White House in 2021, Trump continued his attacks on one cherished American institution after another:

• Facing 91 criminal counts in four cases, he discredited the judicial system, attacking judges, prosecutors, witnesses—and even their family members.
• He attacked Independent Counsel Jack Smith as “deranged” and accused him of trying to invalidate his candidacy for President in 2024.
• He attacked retired U.S. Army General Mark Milley for calling him “a wannabe dictator,” and said that Milley deserved execution as a traitor.
• Milley had successfully averted war with China by calling his Chinese military counterparts in the final weeks of Trump’s administration to assure them that Trump was not planning to attack China.
• He claimed voter fraud where none existed, casting doubt on the integrity of the electoral system.
• He claimed himself to be the victim of “the deep state” inside the federal bureaucracy.
• He attacked the integrity of the FBI—causing previously “law and order” Republicans to demand its defunding. 

* * * * * * * * * *

Donald Trump isn’t crazy, as many of his critics charge. He knows exactly what he’s doing—and why.

He intends to strip every potential challenger to his authority—or his version of reality—of legitimacy with the public. If he succeeds, there will be:

• No independent press to reveal his failures and crimes.
• No independent law enforcement agencies to investigate his abuses of office.
• No independent judiciary to hold him accountable.
• No independent military to dissent as he recklessly hurtles toward a nuclear disaster.
• No candidate—Democrat or Republican—to challenge him for re-election in 2028—or any other year..
• No candidate—Democrat or Republican—to challenge his remaining in office as “President-for-Life.”

A dictator can die of illness or old age. 

China’s Communist ruler, Mao Zedong died on September 9, 1976, at 82, from a series of heart attacks.

And Spain’s Fascist tyrant, Francisco Franco, died on November 20, 1975, at 82, of congestive heart failure.

But there are other ways a tyrant can be forced to give up power—such as the following three.