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But American politics doesn’t work that way. It’s too messy and involves too many ambitious people. American politics is also cyclical, where basically every two years the other party finds its groove and the other seems lost. And this week, on an issue about as personal as it gets for the current president, the rent came due.
On Tuesday, House Republicans overwhelmingly voted to pass a bill forcing the release of the Epstein files — defying Trump openly, decisively, and without hesitation. To be clear there were enough votes to do it before he encouraged them to vote for it anyway. The Senate quickly followed. It was the first moment in Trump’s second term when Republicans directly overruled him in such a big way.
For anyone who has spent the last year treating Trump as politically untouchable, Tuesday’s vote should be clarifying. It revealed what had always been true: Second-term presidents are on borrowed time. It was delusion to believe anything else.
This is the beginning of the end of the Trump era.
Trump is reportedly seething that Democrats outmaneuvered him on the Epstein issue. But the most important player of the week wasn’t a Democrat at all. It was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who not only defied Trump but refused to bend when he retaliated. Her move was the most important ideological shift inside the Republican Party this year: She demonstrated that a figure can remain rooted in MAGA politics while being independent of Donald Trump himself. That combination has long been talked about as a theoretical possibility. Greene made it real.
And she isn’t alone. Even Nancy Mace, running for South Carolina governor in a crowded Republican primary and desperate for Trump’s endorsement, didn’t side with him. She calculated — correctly — that being too closely linked to Trump now carries its own risks.
Why? Because ambitious Republicans can see where the puck is going. They can sense when a dominant figure is beginning to slip. And the pattern is older than Trump.
History offers a familiar script. Barack Obama began losing the party’s center of gravity after the 2014 midterm wipeout, long before the end of his second term. George W. Bush’s influence collapsed almost overnight after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Bill Clinton’s leverage faded the moment the Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998; the party shifted toward positioning itself for the post-Clinton era even as he served out his term. Ronald Reagan saw his political strength evaporate after the Iran-Contra scandal broke in late 1986. Even Lyndon Johnson — though he never had a second term — experienced the phenomenon more abruptly than anyone when Vietnam made him politically toxic inside his own party in 1967.
The pattern in all these cases is the same: Second terms rarely end with a bang. They end with a slow drip of defiance — one vote here, one committee rebellion there — until the perception of invincibility dissolves and the succession race begins.
We are watching that happen now.
Already, multiple Republicans are positioning themselves for a post-Trump future. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas did not deny reports this week that he is forming a 2028 presidential exploratory effort. Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are discussing their own ambitions. None of them would be floating these moves if they believed Trump still held the party in a chokehold.
Add to that the elections earlier this month, where several Trump-aligned candidates struggled or lost, and the picture becomes even clearer. This House vote is not an isolated event. It is part of a broader, nascent political recalibration — one in which Trump remains powerful, yes, but no longer all-powerful.
Look at Indiana, where members of the state Senate this week officially refused to follow Trump’s wishes of a mid-decade redistricting simply because they just didn’t want to. They stuck to their guns for months, even as Vance personally visited them twice. Many refused Trump’s summons to come to the White House and now there are primary threats.
Trump entered his first term as a wrecking ball. He entered his second as a dominant force. But now, only months into that second term, he has taken the first irreversible step into lame-duck status just like most two-term presidents before him.
He didn’t lose the Epstein vote because his base abandoned him, or because Democrats beat him, but because Republicans finally crossed a line they can cross again.
Once a party breaks with its leader once, the second time is easier. Then the third. And then the era changes.
Trump’s era is changing. The only real question now is how quickly he will be going back up the golden escalator.
James Pindell is a Globe political reporter who reports and analyzes American politics, especially in New England.
