Trump is far bigger than Beck and far more media-savvy than Palin; he’s sustained his own celebrity for a very long time. But sustaining power is a different matter, requiring different strengths.

If Trump really wanted to bestride the post-2016 G.O.P. like an orange colossus, neither Trump militias nor Trump TV are the natural path. Instead, 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 (since he’s not getting any younger) auditioning a smoother political apprentice to fill his shoes in 2020.

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.