What happens if Trump loses?

As we close in on the election, I’ve started seeing more conversations about what’ll happen to the GOP and the American right if Trump loses and we move into a Harris administration. The two common predictions seem to be

1. Trumpism is here to stay, and the likelihood of a MAGA candidate winning in 2028, especially if that candidate lacks Trumps cognitive and personality deficiencies, is high. Thus, while four years of Harris is unquestionably better than another four years of Trump, democracy isn’t out of the woods, and could well be in just as precarious a spot in another four years as it is now.

2. Trump’s loss will take the wind out of the MAGA sails, the old GOP will, over time, reassert itself, and we’ll return to something that looks like the Reagan or Paul Ryan Republicans. This might take a while, but especially once Trump either dies or is so far gone cognitively he can’t really communicate, those reform forces in the party will be able to assert themselves without fearing his wrath.

I’m not convinced either’s correct. A second loss will hurt Trump’s influence, and the cognitive decline we’ve seen recently is real and rapid enough that it will accelerate that. And, given that the MAGA movement is predominantly—though not entirely—a cult of personality, Trump being off the stage for one reason or another will sap far-right enthusiasm, and demotivate his most faithful voters. Thus a Trump loss is likely to weaken the fascist MAGA elements that currently control the GOP. This in turn will make the path to victory for a new MAGA candidate more difficult. Project 2025, which was written as a distillation of MAGA policy, is profoundly unpopular with voters, after all—including with Republican voters.

At the same time, though, the GOP is a party controlled by three forces: Trump, the far-right media ecosystem, and primaries. Remove Trump and the other two remain. Fox News isn’t going to ditch Jesse Watters for David French, even if Trump suffers a landslide loss. They know who their audience is and what it craves. Likewise, anyone who wants to run for higher office needs to survive a primary first, primary voters are the furthest right in the GOP, and many of the more moderate Republicans have left the party. If the people picking the candidates want populists and nationalist fascists, that’s what they’re going to get, and the only way the GOP can stop that is to abandon primaries. Which they’ll have a hard time doing, with the party leadership currently dominated by MAGA diehards.

If I had to guess, then, a Trump loss won’t leave us right where we are today, just with someone else other than Trump a coin-flip away, in 2028, from destroying American democracy. The far-right will be weakened. Nor will it mean the collapse of MAGA as the dominant force within the Republican Party. Instead, I think we end up with a Republican Party that stays MAGA, and maybe gets even worse, but finds it impossible to win the presidency, and has a harder and harder time controlling either branch of Congress. They’ll get some state level victories, and have total control of some parts of some states, but as a national party, the GOP will be both weak and unable to fix itself. From there, I’m not sure what happens. We’ve had parties disappear before, to be replaced with new ones. America’s electoral system structurally locks in two parties, but one of them doesn’t need to be the GOP.