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Even before Donald Trump’s improbable victory in 2016, political observers of all stripes have confidently predicted that it was all about to come crashing down.

It happened after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, when dozens of Republican elected officials rescinded their support over Trump’s comments bragging about grabbing women’s genitals. The end was again nigh in May 2017, when former CBS anchor Dan Rather declared that “the curtain may be coming down on this act of this tragedy” after Robert Mueller started investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. After Trump equivocated over a deadly white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, the journalist Matt Taibbi called it “the final stake through the Grinch-heart of his presidency.” An FBI raid on the office of longtime Trump fixer Michael Cohen the following year emboldened then-New Yorker writer Adam Davidson to argue that “we are now in the end stages of the Trump presidency.“ This fellow finally, totally discredited himself,” an “exhilarated” Sen. Mitch McConnell told a New York Times reporter hours after a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol. “Donald Trump is now forever disgraced,” the historian Brenda Wineapple opined in the Times after the House committee investigating Jan. 6 referred him for criminal prosecution. Weeks before Trump won the 2024 election, the Republican pollster Frank Luntz predicted that his debate performance against Kamala Harris would cost the former president the race.

Those pronouncements, from a range of observers responding to varied political setbacks, were all wrong. Even so, Trump’s latest stumble—into an unpopular and increasingly costly war in Iran—already has some writing his political obituary. The conservative journalist Christopher Caldwell penned a cover story last week for the Spectator magazine titled “The End of Trumpism.” Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right former Georgia congresswoman who has broken with the president over more than just Iran, claimed this month that the war’s supporters have “destroyed” MAGA. Sohrab Ahmari, a right-wing populist pundit who endorsed Trump’s 2024 campaign, now thinks Trump “was never the one” to wrest the Republican Party from the hawkish forces that dominated it under George W. Bush. Liberals aren’t immune from the doomsaying either, even if theirs comes tinged with schadenfreude. James Carville, the colorful Democratic strategist, predicts that a tanking economy and catastrophic war will force Trump to abdicate the presidency “next year by this time.” Or as the progressive writer Matt Stoller tweeted over the weekend in a thread about the war’s political blowback, “I do not know why people assume Trump will be in office for much longer.”

Yes, some of Trump’s typical cheerleaders, including Megyn Kelly and Tucker Carlson, have blasted him for going back on his campaign pledge not to embroil the U.S. in more overseas conflicts. As Caldwell put it in his essay, “For Trump’s base, the sense of betrayal is acute.” But if that’s true, someone should tell Trump’s base. The evidence suggests most Republicans are brushing off the intramural criticism. In recent polls, vast majorities back Trump’s bombing campaign, with self-described MAGA voters even more likely to approve than other Republicans. So far, just three congressional Republicans have voted in ways that suggest they oppose the war.

Where does the chronic impulse to forecast Trump’s imminent downfall come from? For Democrats, it’s at least partly an expression of disbelief that he’s gotten this far. Yet the words of Trump’s MAGA-aligned Iran critics suggest that both camps are making the same mistake: failing—or refusing—to see Trump for who he repeatedly shows himself to be. Comeuppance-minded liberals imagine a president who will eventually succumb to scandal or economic catastrophe or electoral defeats. But bowing to those circumstances is a choice, one that Trump, in his shamelessness, has repeatedly refused. Conservatives who think of themselves as Trump’s ideological kin, meanwhile, seem to have mistaken him for a man who believes what he’s selling. “Trump the war-wary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent,” Ahmari wrote, as if Trump’s penchant to flip-flop hasn’t been on display for years. The president, Ahmari also claimed, failed to rebuff anti-Iran jingoists because of “the character factor” (emphasis his) “that was too quickly dismissed by those of us who were thrilled by his shattering of GOP policy orthodoxies.” It’s rare to see someone so straightforwardly admit they were clowned.

Misreading Trump inevitably leads to misreading his movement. Caldwell’s essay imagines the president as a vehicle for forces bigger than himself: “a movement of democratic restoration” against a university-educated elite, cultural progressivism, and a bureaucratic “deep state.” In fact, Trump’s base is following him, not the other way around. Sometimes, as with trade, Trump leads his supporters against old-school Republican orthodoxies. Other times, he affirms them without paying much of a price. In January, after Trump ordered the U.S. military to capture Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, the share of Republicans who supported using force to remove Maduro spiked. When pitted against critics who claim to speak for MAGA, Trump wins. In a survey released last week by the conservative pollster J.L. Partners, 83 percent of Republicans preferred Trump’s foreign-policy judgment to Megyn Kelly’s or Tucker Carlson’s.

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Whether out of affection, shared enemies, or a sense of being in too deep, Republican voters and officeholders have contorted themselves to follow Trump almost wherever goes. The party that blamed Joe Biden for high gas prices now tells Americans to suck it up. “Maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks and so that gas goes a little further,” Michele Tafoya, a Trump-aligned Senate candidate in Minnesota, said last week. Trump allies who once opposed striking Iran are eating their words. During a hearing this month, Elbridge Colby, a top-ranking Defense Department official, claimed not to recognize his own past quotes when a Democratic congressman read them aloud. Others apparently see no contradiction at all. According to a Politico poll last week, about two-thirds of Trump’s 2024 voters either don’t think the Iran war broke Trump’s campaign promise or was necessary because of changing circumstances. A plurality—46 percent—said the war is consistent with MAGA principles.

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Maybe it’s only a matter of time. Most Trump voters seem leery of sending ground troops to Iran, something Trump now appears to be contemplating. Trump has also never before presided over a sustained period of economic malaise; consumer sentiment was higher in March 2020, at the dawn of the COVID recession, than it is now. And Iran adds to a list of other issues, from the Epstein files to tariffs, that have stressed his coalition. As Ahmari noted, a subset of Americans who reelected Trump—around 24 percent of his 2024 voters in separate YouGov and Ipsos surveys released last week—already oppose the war. Many of them seem to be the independent, young, traditionally Democratic, or nonwhite voters who defected to Trump last time and whose growing disillusionment may hurt Republicans in the midterms.

But for now, the evidence of a MAGA schism—let alone Trump’s political downfall—is weak. As even Caldwell acknowledged, “Trump has a gift for escaping seemingly impossible situations of his own making.” The strongest proof is in the title of Caldwell’s essay: The End of Trumpism. When a governing movement takes its name after a political figure, like Caesarism and Stalinism did long before Trumpism, that person usually gets to set its terms. “MAGA loves everything I do. MAGA is me,” the president said after attacking Venezuela. “THEY ARE NOT MAGA, I AM,” he wrote on Truth Social last week of the Republicans criticizing him now. Ahmari, Greene, Carlson, and their ilk may have been wrong to take Trump’s word on Iran. But they probably should on this.

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