I examine how republican theory, both classical and contemporary, wrestles with the inevitability of decay. I argue that two existential conditions define the republican project: institutional inevitability and procedural contingency. These twin logics reflect the awareness of regime mortality and the design of mechanisms intended to delay collapse. Drawing from a rich tradition of thinkers, including Aristotle, Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Madison, I trace how decline is encoded into republican architecture, from ancient succession planning to modern fears of populism and institutional rot. This chapter reframes republicanism not as a solution to crisis, but as a system built to manage it, a structure of ephemeral permanence calibrated to metabolize corruption, failure, and mortality. I show how neoliberalism, authoritarian nostalgia, and spectacle politics have eroded these stabilizing devices, making space for the necro-president to emerge, not as a rupture but as a symptom of the republican body’s exhaustion.