Every aging dictator, every long-in-the-tooth autocrat, every once-terrifying strongman eventually feels the cold hand of Death reaching out to tap them on the shoulder and whisper, “It’s time.”

We all understand mortality. It’s the constant of the human condition, the endless winner of billions of lives, even that of the Dear Leaders whose rule seemed eternal.

We don’t spend enough time on how much chaos and blood comes after that tap in the Generallismo’s shoulder, on the inevitable collapse of systems built around a single man entail.

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.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D) reacted to the White House claiming Adm. Frank M. Bradley, at the authorization of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, gave the order to strike an alleged drug-smuggling boat a second time

“The White House is lying, but that’s no surprise, because they lie for a living, and the American people know it. It’s my understanding that Pete Hegseth, the so-called Secretary of Defense, was absolutely involved.

She should never have been deployed at all. A federal judge ruled last week that Trump’s activation of the National Guard in Washington, DC is illegal—a direct violation of federal statute. The mission had no constitutional basis, no lawful purpose, no justification except one man’s need for the optics of soldiers in the capital.

And Sarah Beckstrom died for those optics.