The Republican Party, Post-2024
By 
As Bouie notes, if Trump gets his hat handed to him by Harris this November, the future of the Republican Party is still Donald Trump, as long as he is still alive.
As striking as the relative electoral weakness of the Trump-era Republican Party is its total inability to either govern or police the boundaries of its coalition. Trump has no program beyond his own prejudices and impulses. “Build the wall” and “mass deportation now” reflect a deep-seated hostility to nonwhite immigrants that has no basis other than rank bigotry. “Stop the steal” and Trump’s broader obsession with so-called election integrity is nothing more than an attempt to operationalize his core belief that he cannot actually lose an election — or anything, for that matter. Fittingly, the Trump-led Republican Party declined to devise a platform for the 2020 presidential election and produced a set of Trump-esque slogans for its 2024 one. To the extent that there is a Republican agenda, it is a product of the hard-right ideologues and conservative organizations that see Trump as a willing vessel and vehicle for their own interests.
…
A defeated Republican Party in November would not be in as dire straits as the Whig Party was 180 years ago. It would still control at least half the nation’s governor’s mansions and may well control either the Senate or the House of Representatives. On the other side, the same structural advantages that would enable the party to weather a Trump defeat and exercise political power may make it all the more difficult for Republicans to pivot toward winning national majorities. If you can hold power through the counter-majoritarian structures and institutions of the American system, why would you work to build a broader coalition than the one you already have?
There is also the issue of Trump himself. He cares less for the fate of the Republican Party than he does for his personal and pecuniary interests. He has no reason to loosen his grip on the party and every reason to keep it in hand. The real question is whether there are Republicans who could pry it away from Trump. The failure of any Republican to successfully contest his leadership or offer a path away from his personal domination of the party is evidence enough that the answer is no.
The anticlimactic truth is that in the wake of a third Trump nomination and a second Trump defeat, the Republican Party would simply stumble along, stuck in his orbit and too weighed down by his gravitational pull to escape.
In 2016, the Republican Party was too weak to stop Trump, and after eight years of his leadership it is too weak to break the hold he has over most of its voters and many of its elected officials. If Trump does lose in November, the Republican Party will still be his, for as long as he wants it to be.
I’ve heard a lot of people say, more on social media than around here that I’ve seen at least, that Trump losing would finally force the party to move on. I simply don’t see the evidence for this. The world of sanity would suggest this is true. But what about the modern Republican Party suggests sanity? Their core voters want full fascism and they are in a full-fledged cult. Yes, after Trump that will change. But it’s almost impossible to see Trump just fade away, no matter his age. And it’s even more impossible to imagine Republican primary voters choosing a cut-rate version while they can have the real thing. I don’t know how many losses it would take for them to come back to reality, but it is definitely more than two.