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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It happened after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, when dozens of Republican elected officials rescinded their support over Trump’s comments bragging about grabbing women’s genitals.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........

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