Sometimes scandal or ineffectiveness is what fells a politician; if they survive those, term limits may get them anyway. But not even the most fearsome and durable leader escapes the eventual decay of their power. The towering Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to drop out of the 1968 presidential race, facing a tough Democratic primary; Margaret Thatcher's powerful reign ended with a Conservative mutiny; Mitch McConnell, once the wily master of the Senate, now finds himself an ostracized backbencher. Trump may have imagined he was immune. If so, he wasn't alone. The rules of political gravity, journalists have often declared, sometimes seem not to apply to him. He defied the Republican Party establishment to win the 2016 nomination. He beat the odds to defeat Hillary Clinton that fall. And although he was written off as finished following the 2020 election and his attempt to steal it, Trump completed the greatest comeback in American political history in 2024, easily eclipsing Richard...
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