Politics as theatre. Celebrity as currency. Wellness as religion. And power as the only real language in the room. Subscribe to PRIMAL SCREAM with Joanna Coles on Substack for exclusive news, reviews and commentary.
Recently on the “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast, my brilliant if occasionally belligerent co-host Michael Wolff argued that it was a waste of breath to talk about the 25th Amendment because Donald Trump has surrounded himself with loyal allies who would never bring him down. I replied that back in the Nineties, people in the United Kingdom had said the same thing about Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. I started to tell the story of her fall from power when Michael cut me off, insisting that it would never happen to Trump, so it wasn’t worth discussing.
But several viewers commented on YouTube that they would like to hear what happened to Mrs T, so I will tell the story here, because it’s a fine illustration of how power always looks impregnable, right before it isn’t. Or as Mike Campbell, when asked how he went bankrupt in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, put it: “Two ways: gradually and then suddenly.”
From the outside, a leader appears armored by office, ritual, and the daily choreography of deference to their position of power. From the inside, the calculation is colder.
As questions swirl around Donald Trump’s fitness for office—the 2 AM “I am Jesus” posts, the impetuous war, the bullying of allies—the relevant lesson isn’t from the Democrats. It’s from Republicans. Leaders are rarely felled by the mob; they’re unseated by the people who once clapped the loudest. Trump understands this instinctively. It’s why he brought his rivals into the tent. It’s better to have the ambitious seated at your table than sharpening knives in the kitchen.
If you want to see how the improbable can happen, rewind to Margaret Thatcher in 1990—a time when she, too, looked unassailable. With three election victories under her belt and a huge global reputation, she had commanded the stage for over a decade, leaving her contemporaries in the gloaming. But satisfaction was not guaranteed. Thatcher’s support of a poll tax, where “a duke pays the same as a dustman,” was the first crack in her armor. Another crack emerged after the infamous “No. No. No.” speech, where she scolded the European Commission.
Poets tell us that cracks allow the light in, but they also allow the opposition in, even from one’s own side. Then the question becomes: Who can move first? And who can survive the morning after?
Enter Michael Heseltine, a seething former Secretary of State for Defence in Thatcher’s Cabinet with the patience to wait and the ego to pounce. A hardliner, Heseltine had been on the receiving end of several Thatcher rebukes, and while she was on a trip to Paris, he made his move.
He triggered a small procedural act –a leadership contest–that no one expected to unseat the Prime Minister. But with visions of power dancing in their own heads, a few other Conservatives joined him. The first ballot didn’t quite finish Thatcher off, but it didn’t need to. It had yanked the thread of discontent. The unthinkable had begun, and it revealed the truth: the Iron Lady was losing her Iron Grip. Ministers who had prospered under her began the quiet math of self-preservation. The private assurances of support drained away. The woman who had stared down unions and outlasted three Labour rivals found herself confronting the only adversary she couldn’t dominate: her own side.
The humiliation was not theatrical; it was administrative. Colleagues filed in, one by one, to tell her the numbers weren’t there. Then came the terrible recognition that loyalty has an expiration date. There was a now-infamous walk back into 10 Downing Street, no longer as the boss but a bean counter of votes she no longer had.
And then the final twist of the knife: not Heseltine, the bold challenger, but the least expected figure, nerdy John Major, who emerged as the acceptable heir.
History repeats this pattern with unnerving consistency. Richard Nixon wasn’t undone by Watergate alone, but by the moment his own party, led by figures like Barry Goldwater, made it clear there weren’t enough votes in the Senate to avoid him being impeached, convicted and removed from office. Boris Johnson survived repeated scandals until his Cabinet began to resign in a drip, which turned into a flood. Each fresh departure became a sign that the center could not hold.
Even Julius Caesar, history’s most mythologized strongman, was brought down not by enemies at the gates but by men he knew, trusted, and dined with. Et tu, Brute? Sixty senators plotted against him. Sixty! A filibuster-proof majority.
Earlier this week, we watched as Peter Magyar, a former member of Viktor Orban’s party who broke away, took the reins in Hungary—and now vows to hold Orban and his cronies accountable for their corruption. The lesson is simple: leaders fall when the people closest to them decide the future is safer without them, and when staying loyal becomes riskier than walking away. Which is why Trump’s instinct to include rivals in the inner circle is both shrewd and dangerous. The same people brought inside to neutralize threats–“Little” Marco Rubio, Tulsi Gabbard, Doug Burgum, JD Vance–are the ones best positioned to measure, in real time, whether he still serves their future.
And when that moment comes, it doesn’t matter how loudly the crowd once cheered or how large the rallies looked on TV. What matters is the quiet math in back rooms, the murmured conversations, the sudden absence of reassurance.
Power ends not with a bang but with a headcount.
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