THE TRUMP PERSONALITY CULT WILL BREAK UP AFTER HE STOPS WINNING

National Review's Jim Geraghty reads a Wall Street Journal editorial and expresses despair:

... the biggest howler in the Journal’s editorial is this:

If Mr. Trump does lose, his voters need to understand that he was the architect of his own demise. Republican voters also need to see that alienating non-whites, women and young people was a losing strategy.

Do you see any scenario where the majority of Trump voters “understand he was the architect of his own demise”? John Nolte is already blaming #NeverTrump Republicans. The vast majority of Trump supporters believe that the most unpopular presidential candidate since David Duke is going to beat Hillary, and most think he will beat her in a landslide. If and when Hillary wins, most of Trump’s supporters will insist the election was rigged and that massive numbers of illegal immigrants voted. Like the man they hail, their modus operandi is blaming everyone but themselves.

Yes, they'll blame skulduggery and Democratic deployment of sinister black and brown people -- but Republicans always do that, don't they? Here's a 2012 Townhall article called "Obama Likely Won Re-Election Through Election Fraud." Here's a Breitbart article from 2014 titled "Study: Non-Citizen Votes May Have Tipped 2008 Election for Obama." And for the "respectable" version of this, read "Romney Blames Loss on Obama’s ‘Gifts’ to Minorities and Young Voters."

n a conference call with fund-raisers and donors to his campaign, Mr. Romney said Wednesday afternoon that the president had followed the “old playbook” of using targeted initiatives to woo specific interest groups — “especially the African-American community, the Hispanic community and young people.”

“In each case, they were very generous in what they gave to those groups,” Mr. Romney said....

However, with the passage of time, rank-and-file Republicans have decided that they loathe both Romney and McCain. If you ask them whether Obama won because of ACORN or "free stuff" or massive numbers of undocumented immigrants voting, sure, they'll say yes -- but they still blame the last two party nominees for being big losers. Why shouldn't the same thing happen to Trump?

But Trump is different, you say. All along, rank-and-file Republicans thought McCain and Romney were sellout Establishment milquetoasts, while Trump is a warrior for their cause. Yes, but once upon a time these same Republicans thought Sarah Palin was literally the modern equivalent of the fighting Esther of the Bible. Now, on the right, she's largely seen as a joke. Prior to that, George W. Bush was seen by conservatives as worthy of Mount Rushmore. Now the right's opinion of him is a mixture of admiration and embarrassment.

I could add lesser examples: Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Rick Perry, Ben Carson. All were right-wing heroes -- but then they were brought low, and they no longer seemed to have any power over their political enemies, who just laughed at them. If that's Trump's fate in November -- which is certainly what the polls indicate -- then Trump's going to go the way of all the other enemy-smiters who surrender their hero status when they lose their ability to smite.

At Business Insider, Josh Barro writes:

Trump and his fans will say that the Republican establishment sabotaged Trump by withholding their support, hoping they could quash his insurgency by manufacturing a wide loss to Hillary Clinton. They will not go away quietly.

But they won't have Trump to rally around -- he's said, "I don't think I'm going to lose, but if I do, I don't think you're ever going to see me again, folks. I think I'll go to Turnberry and play golf or something." And no one else who might fill the void has Tump's media savvy, or his credibility with non-Trump broadcasters and reporters, or the aura of winning that's so thoroughly fooled his fans.

So I think all the energy will dissipate -- and eventually Trump himself will be seen as someone who took on all the evil people and just became a laughingstock. Eventually he'll be a punch line even on the right.

The next right-wing hero will be anyone who makes President Clinton's life miserable, or undermines some other high-profile group of Democrats and/or liberals. That's how the dream of totally annihilating their enemies will live on in rank-and-file conservatives' hearts.