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The Republican political graveyard is littered with bodies that Donald Trump has gleefully buried.

No politician in modern American history has been so dominant in the internecine fights of his own party. Trump’s track record of picking general-election winners is mixed at best, but he is extremely successful when it comes to either choosing the winners of Republican primaries or marginalizing Republicans who run afoul of him. Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Liz Cheney, and Jeff Flake have no future in the GOP. Whether he sat in the White House or not, Trump’s endorsement was the true gold standard for Republicans, and he always knew this. His power was so great he was able to elevate substandard, inexperienced candidates almost at will. This was how Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Herschel Walker, Dr. Oz, and Doug Mastriano all became nominees for Senate or governor in competitive states — all going down against Democrats.

Come next year, Trump will face a new test: Can he crush the Republicans who have defied him in 2025? Is MAGA, which may be on the wane overall, bigger than even he is, with candidates able to claim the mantle without his sign-off? Trump has broken with plenty of onetime loyalists, but there was something especially shocking about his decision to repudiate Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. She has been full-fledged MAGA from the beginning of her congressional career, and it was hard to imagine, over the past few years, a more unstinting ally. Greene ferociously attacked anti-Trump Republicans and Democrats and embraced the lie that Democrats had stolen the 2020 election. On cultural and economic issues, she and Trump were completely aligned. She was perhaps his most loyal foot soldier in Congress and a charismatic, social-media-savvy counterweight to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Greene damaged her relationship with Trump by challenging the Republican House leadership to release the Epstein files and insisting that Republicans, including Trump, were not paying enough attention to voters’ concerns around affordability and health care. Trump also seemed to be irked by Greene’s growing outreach to the mainstream media, including a soft-focus appearance on The View. Trump now calls her a traitor and has vowed to back a primary challenge against her next year.

Trump has failed in Georgia before. Attempts to dislodge Republican governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, two Republicans who refused to overturn the results of the 2020 election, were unsuccessful. But the challenge to Greene will be unique because she has been such a creature of MAGA. If Trump can’t take her down, it will say much about his strength within the party going forward. The same will be true in Indiana, where Republicans have spurned him by refusing to enact an aggressive gerrymander to add Republican House seats. Trump may target Rod Bray, the president pro tempore of the Indiana State Senate, and several other lawmakers.

One difference between 2026 and every other time Trump has tried to drive a supposedly disloyal Republican from office is Trump’s own lame-duck status. It’s finally dawning on Republicans that Trump will not be an eternal president. He can flirt all he wants with violating the Constitution to seek a third term, but the cold reality for him is that he will be a president in his 80s and, if trends hold, very unpopular. The economic outlook is at best middling, and almost all his domestic policies have proved alienating to wide swaths of voters. After Republicans took a drubbing earlier in the month, it’s hard to see how the midterms will be any better. A blue wave could hand the House back to Democrats and narrow the GOP margin in the Senate.

A lame-duck Trump, then, is different from the Trump of 2019 or 2022 aggressively steering the direction of the GOP. In those years, he was either a first-term president or a vanquished president who nevertheless convinced large chunks of his party that he was, against all available evidence, unfairly denied a second term. The indictments only fed the myth of Trump as martyr. Out of office, he loomed remarkably large over the Republican imagination. For rank-and-file Republicans, he could truly do no wrong.

Perhaps Trump has enough juice left to knock Greene out or defeat the resistant Indiana Republicans. He has proved his doubters wrong in the past. We’ll find out soon, either way. But for all his durability, Trump has never slogged through a second term before. He has never had younger Republicans contemplating life after him and the long-term future of the party. The more they look ahead, the weaker Trump becomes.

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