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During the State of the Union, the President usually sends a member of his Cabinet far away in case the Capitol gets blown up, as the "designated survivor." Usually this is someone who no one would notice actually showing up, like the Secretary of Agriculture. When the Capitol ''is'' blown up, the Secretary of Agriculture must go from teaching farmers how to grow peanuts to running a country. [[Hilarity Ensues]].
 
See also [[Twenty -Fifth Amendment]]. [[Super -Trope]] of [[Spare to The Throne]].
 
{{examples}}
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* Merlin, the protagonist of [[Roger Zelazny]]'s second ''[[Book of Amber|Amber]]'' series, ends the series by becoming the ruler of Chaos after everyone ahead of him kills each other off.
** Merlin's uncle Random, youngest of King Oberon's children, unexpectedly inherits the throne via [[Deus Ex Machina]] (the Unicorn) in the final book of the first [[Book of Amber|series]].
* In George R. R. Martin's prequels to ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'', the ''Dunk & Egg'' stories, a little boy named Egg is a major character. In the main novels, we learn he became Aegon Targaryen, the Fifth of His Name, King of the Andals and the Rhoynar and the First Men, styled Aegon the Unlikely for assuming a throne no one expected he'd get as he was the youngest son of a king's youngest brother. He proved an excellent ruler though, and given his [[Royal Brat|older]] [[Rich Idiot With No Day Job|brothers]], the Seven Kingdoms came out lucky that time. It's generally accepted that he was the [[Royally Screwed -Up|last decent one.]]
** Aemon Tarygaryen, one of his older brothers, survives to the main stories as an old, old man who took the Maester's Chains and went to the Wall as a young man. He dies at 102 asking in his delirium for Egg. He tells a story to a young Jon Snow about how, many years ago, before Egg was crowned King, the nobles and the Maesters asked him to renounce his vows and take the throne. Egg was only crowned because Aemon took his vows seriously.
** King Robert Baratheon hails from a cadet branch of the Targaryen line, so his succession was just as unlikely. By all accounts he graciously accepted the position of King after he smashed the Targaryen dynasty, but before he could even be crowned there were a few tense moments where anyone from Ned Stark, Tywin Lannister, and even Jaime Lannister could have proclaimed themselves king, but didn't. Then there's also the unfortunate fact the legitimate successor that he killed (Rhaegar Targaryen) would have been a perfectly decent king compared to his father Aerys.
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== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* Laura Roslin from ''[[Battlestar Galactica Reimagined (TV)|Battlestar Galactica Reimagined]]'', who as the Secretary of Education was 43rd in line of succession. She became President after the Cylons' nuclear attack killed everyone higher-ranking than her.
** She was actually asked to resign her position by the President a few days earlier, after going against his wishes when dealing with a teacher's strike. Her resignation would be have been made official when she got back to Caprica from the ''Galactica''.
* Part of the aliens' plan in the ''[[Doctor Who (TV)|Doctor Who]]'' episode "Aliens in London" was to kill off enough of the British government to make the MP who they'd replaced with an alien into Prime Minister.
** Why didn't they just impersonate the Prime Minister? He was [[Replicant Snatching|too skinny to fit inside]].
* ''[[Jericho]]''. Nuclear attacks leave the Secretary of Health and Human Services as the highest surviving official. [[Divided States of America|Some people do not agree...]]
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== [[Real Life]] ==
* Further down [[The House of Windsor]], George VI was not expecting to become King, going for a military career. Then his brother abdicated.
* While it has never actually come into play beyond the well-known examples of Vice Presidents taking over for their dead Presidents, the US government has a very specific [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_line_of_succession:United States presidential line of succession|line of Presidential succession]] that specifies who would become President in the event of the inability of multiple people in line to serve. This did come up among pundits in the aftermath of the 1981 assassination attempt against Ronald Reagan, where Secretary of State Al Haig stated to the press, "Pending the arrival of the Vice-President, I'm in charge here at the White House." While he meant that he was just running the White House and Presidential offices until VP George H.W. Bush could return from his vacation in Maine, the pundits all ignored the context and treated it as if Haig was trying to stage a coup. (Until Bush could be contacted, the acting President was technically Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill, though his primary responsibility was command over US nuclear forces until Bush could be contacted.) Because this line of succession also puts a hard limit on how far down the governmental food chain the Presidency can fall, the Secret Service makes certain that, at any event where the entire succession would be expected to appear (such as a State of the Union Address), one person in the line of succession is ''not'' in attendance, instead being kept at a safe house far enough away that no single plausible catastrophe could kill him along with the rest of the succession.
** The "Designated Survivor" rule has been unofficially extended by Congress to include at least one Senator and one Representative, so that in the event of a decapitation strike there would also be successors to the roles of Senate President Pro Tempore and Speaker of the House.
** The aforementioned line of succession is somewhat random. Currently, if something happens to Obama, the office passes first to Vice-President Biden, then Speaker Boehner. Okay so far. If something happens to all three, as of December 2011, the man the United States would turn to is...Daniel Inouye, the 85 year-old Senator from Hawaii who holds his position solely by virtue of being the longest-serving member of the majority party. (The spot was held by the even older Robert Byrd until his recent passing.) The Secretary of Homeland Security, who you'd think ought to be in charge after a decapitation strike, is ''last'' in the list. This is because the rest of the line of succession is determined by the age of the office, and since the Department of Homeland Security is the newest department, the Secretary of Homeland Security is last in line, while the fourth in line is the Secretary of State. (Besides, one imagines they'd be rather busy at that moment.)
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* While we're discussing the Tudors, in 1547, when Henry VIII died, Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots was 4th in line for the English Throne. With three healthy legitimate children alive, it was considered very unlikely the Stuarts would ever get a hold of the throne. All three of his legitimate heirs assumed the English throne at some point, and all three died childless. 56 years after the death of Henry VIII, [[The House of Stuart|James VI Stuart]] of Scotland assumed the English throne as James I.
* And then, the successors to the Stuarts, [[The House of Hanover]]. Due to the exclusion of Catholics from the succession by the Act of Settlement 1701 and the death of Queen Anne's children, the Prince of the German Electorate of Brunswick-Luneburg (also known as Hanover) was more or less handed the throne of Great Britain out of nowhere. This is why George I and George II spoke little to no English: George I and II were 41 and 18, respectively, when the Act of Settlement passed, making them second and third in line (after George I's mother Sophia), and were 54 and 31 when the throne passed to their house. This led to the development of government by the King's ministers rather than the monarch himself, and by the end of George I's reign, the general system used in Britain today had been developed under the guidance of the (unofficial) Prime Minister [[Sir Robert Walpole]]. So, indirectly, we have this trope to thank for the modern system of parliamentary democracy--used in some form by the vast majority of democratic states in existence today.
* The possibly greatest subversion of the trope was [http://en.[wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramiro_II_of_Aragon:Ramiro II of Aragon|Ramiro II of Aragon]]. The fourth son of King Sancho, he wasn't expected to inherit or hold a political position at all and became a priest. However, all three of his elder brothers died without issue, two of them after having seized the crown. He was then literally taken from his abbey, given a Papal permission to abandon his vows so he could guarantee the survival of the dynasty and crowned. He complied, married, had a daughter, abdicated to her and had her married when she was ''1 year old''. With his deed accomplished in record time, he took the vows again and went back to his abbey.
* Invoked in the later two-thirds of the Qing dynasty of the [[Imperial China]]. Yongzheng emperor had his legitimacy consistently questioned due to the [[Succession Crisis]] in 1710-1720s (in which his father deposed the crown prince and did not set up any up to his death), and decided that while the monarch have the power to nominate any successor, there should not be ''any expectation'' for anyone to be one. The modus operandi is thus: every moment the emperor was alive, he was required to keep a succession will sealed and hidden somewhere in the palace, and would only be opened at the time the said emperor passed away. As a result, no heir would be ''publicly'' named, and while the emperor's personal preference may be apparent, it would never be any indication of who would be succeeding.
 
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[[Category:Politics Tropes]]
[[Category:Unexpected Successor]]
[[Category:Trope]]
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