The Republican nominee’s base is senior citizens, not the testosterone-addled young. How many of them are actually ready to rumble at Roger Stone’s command? If the answer is “not very many,” then you could easily imagine Trump overplaying his hand in an anti-concession speech, and inadvertently revealing that his right-wing populism is more virtual, more reality-television, than the 1930s variety.
.. Here Beck’s example is instructive: When he left Fox for The Blaze, he went from being the leading Wild Man of the histrionic anti-Obama right to being just one conservative media personality among many. (In fairness, he also mellowed considerably.) Another instructive example is Sarah Palin, who went from icon to afterthought fairly quickly following the 2008 campaign.
.. he would be better served behaving like, well, a semi-normal political leader — deploying himself as the voice of Trumpism on the existing cable networks, finding or recruiting a set of younger politicians to carry the Trumpist banner in 2018, supporting efforts to fund-raise and build out the infrastructure for a Trumpist equivalent of the netroots or the Tea Party ..
.. And the fact that exactly none of these sound like the Trump we know so well is the best reason to suspect that he won’t be as influential over the next four years as a lot of people fear. The things that would really maximize his influence, like the things that would have made him a competitive presidential candidate in 2016, are all things that he may be temperamentally incapable of doing.