This unlikely messenger is exposing Trump's killer weakness

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), according to reporting in Axios, is setting his sights on a 2028 run for the presidency. The report forced Donald Trump to respond to it, and thus to talk about life without him as the leader of MAGA, much less America.

No, Cruz will not be elected president in ‘28 — and we certainly don’t want that to happen — but we should encourage the talk nonetheless, and media should to bring it up more. Apparently, the White House is angry with Cruz for putting it out there, seeing it as undermining Trump — and JD Vance. As NOTUS reports:

The White House and its allies believe Sen. Ted Cruz is taking positions antithetical to President Donald Trump from his perch as chair of the Senate Commerce Committee as a way to position himself against Vice President JD Vance ahead of 2028.

And they’re not happy about it. Cruz has been making life difficult for the White House behind the scenes.

And that’s why it’s a good thing. This week’s outcome of the months-long debacle in Congress over the Epstein files, coming to a head after Republicans saw a Democratic blowout at the polls two weeks ago, underscores that Trump is a lame duck.

The dam burst, as Republicans rushed to vote to force the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files. We have not seen a president rebuked like this in ions, with a veto-proof majority that was nearly unanimous in the House and Senate.

Sure, Trump jumped on the bandwagon and told Republicans to vote for it, but only after he saw he was going to lose big. He could release the files at any time, and didn’t need a bill. He signed the bill — which he had to do, or face that veto-proof majority — with no cameras, nor with the victims by his side, announcing it on Truth Social in the dead of night.

Trump was forced to do something he was loath to do. It doesn’t mean the files will be released, as he’ll go to Plan B or Plan C, working with the DOJ to block them or strip out anything in them about him. While that’s not good for the victims who want justice, any further stonewalling will just keep the story out there. It will never go away, and will continue to bring Trump down.

Trump is the lamest of ducks, as Republicans in states like Indiana now defy his orders to redistrict and further gerrymander. And Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (D-GA) went for broke and created a huge clash with Trump. She was the most high-profile deep, dark MAGA figure to break with him, taking a gamble that it would work for her. And it did.

Trump finally exploded and called her a “traitor” — which is rich for so many reasons, including that she’s used that word against so many others — inspiring violent threats against her. None of us knows MTG’s true motives. On Friday, she dropped the stunning news that she would resign from Congress in January. There’s been lots of talk about her positioning herself to run for president too.

Bring it on!

No, MTG will not be elected president. But the more the MAGA base talks about this rift and about other Republicans running for president, the more they show that they’re dividing and also looking at life beyond Trump, who’s dropped his threats — for now — of running for a third term.

Trump’s power over the GOP is slipping, and the Jeffrey Epstein debacle was really a massive exposure of that. NBC News reports that Greene’s voters, while they still support Trump in her blood-red, gerrymandered district in Georgia, also continue to support her.

Before Greene announced her resignation, NBC interviewed voters in her district. Trump had pulled his endorsement of Greene and threatened to back a candidate to primary her. But it doesn’t seem to be working:

“That’s not right. It’s not right,” Debbie Dyer, 60, said of Trump’s accusation. “She should not be seen as a traitor. She’s trying to do the best for the American people and I think Donald Trump should accommodate her and work for America.”

“She has a lot of courage and tells it like it is,” added Dyer, who lives in Dalton, near the Tennessee border, and works at a carpet company.

Trump was hoping the voters would choose between him and Greene, and choose him — his black-and-white world in which you’re either with him or you’re against him — but that doesn’t appear to be happening. This tactic always worked for Trump, but it’s now deflating.

“Some people are struggling with it. Some are choosing Team Marjorie, and some are Team Trump,” said Angela Dollar, a local Republican official in Floyd County, part of Greene’s district.

As for Dollar: “I can like two people who don’t like each other. My hope is they’ll reconcile.”

It seems highly doubtful that Trump is going to destroy Greene. And that’s a big deal.

Of course, none of us should trust or root for Greene, who’s been a vile force in politics, her recent pushback on Trump notwithstanding.

But if Trump no longer has the power to destroy Republicans by backing primaries against them — and as more of them learn that that’s true — we could see the GOP bucking him on a number of issues as we head toward the mid-terms, where Democrats have opened up a big lead in the generic ballot.(A whopping 14 points in one poll, and high single digits in others.)

Republicans are in disarray, with a civil war under way over everything from welcoming holocaust denier Nick Fuentes into the party to fears about the impact of Obamacare subsidies expiring.

The only thing uniting the GOP for years has been a fear of Trump.

But if that fear dissipates, the splits just widen, as they fight one another more and facilitate the MAGA crack up. And that is definitely something to root for.

• Michelangelo Signorile writes The Signorile Report, a free and reader-supported Substack. If you’ve valued reading The Signorile Report, consider becoming a paid subscriber and supporting independent, ad-free opinion journalism.