President Donald Trump’s tight grip on the GOP, long assumed to be an inevitable feature of American life (like gravity or the McRib’s seasonal return), has started to loosen.

Republicans are now openly defying him. The man who once ruled the GOP like a casino boss can’t even strong-arm Indiana Republicans into gerrymandering themselves properly.

This sort of resistance didn’t emerge overnight. It fermented like prison wine or bad ideas in a faculty lounge. First came the Iran bombing: an early shock that suggested “America First” might also mean “Israel First,” at least to the populist-nationalist camp inside the GOP.

Then came the effort to muffle the Jeffrey Epstein files, a notion so foreign to MAGA’s ethos that the subsequent drama, according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.,

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