This week provided compelling evidence that we may have hit peak Trump. The whirlwind of executive orders, envelope pushing, shock and awe, blitzkrieg and culture wars that marked out 2025 is unsustainable into next year. I’ll get to the specifics of that, not least his bad break-up with Marjorie Taylor Greene. But before the now, consider the then. History is not kind to re-elected presidents.

From Lincoln to Obama: there is a pattern

I don’t have in mind disasters such as Abraham Lincoln’s assassination 41 days into his second term. This fate could have befallen him at any moment. Rather, observe the constitutional and political pressures to which all the modern presidents have been inescapably subject.

Lyndon Johnson, to all intents and purposes, ran for a second term in 1964 (he had, of course, become president on John Kennedy’s death in November 1963). He won the largest share of the popular vote (61.1 per cent) of any 20th-century president. In 1968 he gave up, announcing his decision to step aside. Overreach in Vietnam ruined his presidency. He waged a war on poverty; poverty won. His landslide mandate proved no protection.

Richard Nixon, the man who replaced him, won by even more points (23.2) in his second election in 1972 – smashing his hapless opponent by 49 states to one. But the Watergate burglary had already started the slow death of his presidency. Nixon’s second term was an extreme version of a car crash that his two-term successors each experienced.

Ronald Reagan, again, huge mandate in 1984, endured a second term fighting not just encroaching Alzheimer’s disease but a White House team breaking the law in service of his vision. The Iran-Contra scandal – in which Reagan sold weapons to Tehran’s mullahs to raise cash for anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua – nearly got him impeached. This sorry affair was presaged by the Challenger disaster – a big government failure – in January 1986.

Bill Clinton enjoyed a dotcom boom and engineered a balanced budget. He enjoyed significant success in his second term, like peace in Northern Ireland and overthrow of Slobodan Milosevic (on whom he had made war). But the Lewinsky affair, leading to his impeachment, will be in the first few lines of his obituary. His failure to interdict the 9/11 plot, realised eight months after he left office, may also feature.

George W. Bush won the first post-9/11 election in 2004 (the last Republican to win with more than 50 per cent of the popular vote). We remember his second term through the lens of the Iraq civil war, Hurricane Katrina and the Great Recession.

Barack Obama was a better campaigner than a president. Progressive moral superiority, developed by and under him, presented Americans with Hillary Clinton, and we know how that turned out. Obama’s second term sowed the seeds for the victory of his political nemesis, Trump.

In all these cases, 2.0 missteps were magnified by a combination of hubris (at winning again) coupled with the natural decay of political authority (made possible by the 22nd amendment); every two-termer since Dwight Eisenhower knows his duck will get lamer, his patronage weaker, as his term limit creeps closer.

Breaking up with MTG

We are entering that stage of the Trump presidency. He cannot run again, as I have argued in these pages. He has a cabinet of apparent loyalists who will fracture and conspire as they jostle to succeed him in 2029.

The defection of Greene could be counted as one of the several Trump has caused across his nearly five years in office. Remember Mike Pence? Elon Musk? The MTG break-up could be more portentous. She is MAGA in a dress with a southern drawl. There was no greater Trump loyalist in congress. But she has denounced her former hero’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein fallout. A conspiracy theorist and Tucker Carlson isolationist, loathed by progressives, she has suddenly become flavour of their month.

Her defence of Epstein’s victims forced Trump into backing the release of FBI files on the convicted pedophile. Her scepticism of a growing diplomatic and military interventionism – in the Middle East and possibly in Venezuela – led Trump to brand her a “traitor”. She may be eccentric, not a central player in this presidency, but this is a MAGA crack. It repeats a pattern we see across administrations. Men re-elected with significant mandates offer false hope that their bases will be endlessly facilitated and appeased. When this doesn’t happen, the base starts looking for the next guy.

Trump’s possible insulation from this process is the sheer scale of his appeal, charisma and difference from any of the 22 other re-elected presidents. But those attributes must be seen in the light of his constitutional limitations – that the clock is ticking (he has 1155 days left in office, less if you aren’t reading this on Saturday, about 38 months) – and the laws of political gravity (his authority will ebb more than it flows).

The Epstein files

Scandal, foreign and domestic, scarred most of the second terms of the past 50 years. We can’t know if a dead Epstein or a live Greene will be Trump’s undoing. There may not be enough in the files (documenting various federal probes into the financier and his girlfriend) for them to constitute some sort of Watergate. And this affair mostly predates Trump’s first presidency. His immunity by profusion – the knack Trump has to evade cancellation for any one sin because he commits so many – has proved durable. He may yet defy a second-term collapse. He has broken so many conventions. Why not this one?

There is gathering evidence he may not be able to. Trump’s version of his opponents’ lawfare – Vengeance 2.0 – is not going to plan. This dubious politico-legal strategy delivers the opposite of what its adopters intend. Expect the indictment of former FBI director James Comey (whom the President detests) to be dismissed without prejudice (a victory for constitutional order).

Midterm elections this time next year will almost certainly lead to Democratic gains in congress. It has ever been thus.

“His” US Supreme Court is as likely to elide the issue of tariff constitutionality as to affirm it. Trump’s whole economic strategy could be undone less by a drop in consumer confidence (increasingly real) as by its not passing constitutional muster. Again, overreach is not a two-termer’s friend. It is their fate.

Trump faces the challenge that hides in plain sight for every leader of the People’s Republic of China: “What happens if I stop delivering the prosperity and growth on which my power depends?” Covid meant Trump 1.0 never had to face this reckoning. Trump 2.0 does. And he has a MAGA base and a pissed-off Greene demanding answers.

Trump warned Americans they would get sick of winning under him. He is certainly now starting to lose what should have been easy wins. If he cannot keep MTG onside, who can he keep onside? If he succumbs to second-term “path dependence” – the concept that historical decisions and institutional arrangements shape current and future outcomes – scholars will remember him as a disruptive but not transformational president.

For his fans, the ecstatic emancipation of victory 12 months ago could have a long hangover. They should recall the Romanian proverb: a return of leaders is the joy of fools.

Timothy J. Lynch is professor of American politics at the University of Melbourne.