SOMEDAY TRUMP WILL BE GONE -- BUT THE CRAZINESS WILL REMAIN

We're often told that America will be a much better place once Donald Trump is driven from politics, by whatever means -- defeat, death, retirement, prison, dementia. We're told that MAGA will die, because no one can replace Trump as its figurehead.

I agree that Trump has a unique appeal to the lunkheads who love him. It's hard to imagine J.D. Vance or Ron DeSantis replicating that fandom.

But I wonder if we're looking at this the wrong way. Instead of focusing on the leadership of modern conservatism, maybe we should be looking at its followers.

Here's a story from CNN about Trump supporters' schemes to overturn a Kamala Harris win. Please pay attention to what these people believe:

“Yes, the steal is happening again,” Emerald Robinson, a right-wing broadcaster with nearly 800,000 followers on X, declared in a blog post earlier this month, criticizing the fact that votes may take days to count in some states. “It doesn’t take days to get election results. It takes days to cheat.”

Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock.com CEO who donated millions of dollars to efforts investigating the 2020 election, warned on Telegram this week of a cyberattack that would rig the election and lead to imminent “death and cannibalism” unless Americans stand together.

And Greg Locke, a prominent Tennessee pastor who spoke near the Capitol the day before the January 6 riot, told his followers in a sermon earlier this month that the US would be hit with “a catastrophic storm that is going to be man-made” in the days before the election, as an apparent method of stealing the vote.

“If Kamala wins this election, hear me when I tell you, we will never have another one,” Locke predicted....

... GOP Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene ... has also floated a conspiracy theory that recent US Capitol Police training exercises are connected to a plan by congressional Democrats to keep Trump out of power even if he wins.

Millions of people find all this plausible, and are outraged by it. Once Trump is no longer in politics, where will this conspiratorial rage go? It won't go away. It's much older than Trump's political career -- thirty years ago, millions of Republicans believed Bill Clinton had a murderous "body count" that would put a serial killer to shame.

Clearly there's a massive audience for right-wing conspiratorialism, so the people who spread this variety of disinformation will just keep doing it, even in Trump's absence. It will still enrage voters even if the Republican Party is no longer led by a compulsive liar and conspiratorialist.

In the past, this energy helped sustain Republican solidarity even when the GOP's leaders didn't directly embrace it the way Trump has. In the future, even if the leaders of the GOP seem respectable, this energy will remain. The conspiratorialism won't seem like a core GOP principle to most observers, but it will still keep millions voting for the party. And eventually there'll be another party leader who embraces it openly.

I don't know who'll take over the Republican Party when Trump is no longer the leader. I don't think it will necessarily be a politician -- it could be Tucker Carlson or Mike Flynn or Charlie Kirk or Don Jr., or it could be Elon Musk hand-picking the next presidential nominee because he can't run himself. But whoever takes the reins when Trump is gone, I don't see the craziness we associated with MAGA going away.