Maybe a Trump movement is struggling toward self-consciousness, and in four to eight years it will be fully formed. But for now there aren’t Trump-like candidates challenging Republican politicians insufficiently committed to his cause (this has been a pretty easy year for incumbents, in fact), nor is there a Trumpish version of the netroots poised to be a player in Republican politics in 2018 or 2020. (The closest thing to a Trumpist activist cohort is the so-called “alt-right,” a mix of Jacobite enthusiasm and noxious racism that’s still mostly a Twitter and comment-thread phenomenon.)

A few prominent Trumpistas do make a neat ideological fit with Trumpism as it might exist going forward — border hawks like Jeff Sessions and Jan Brewer, resentful populists like Sarah Palin, media bomb-throwers like Ann Coulter and the remaining Breitbart crew. But mostly he’s surrounded by has-been politicians looking for a second life, media personalities looking for an audience, and grifters looking to cash in (but I repeat myself).

So when Trump is no longer a candidate for president, Sean Hannity will probably morph back into a partisan hatchet man, Ben Carson will go back to his speaking circuit, Newt Gingrich will find some new ideological coat to wear and Chris Christie will take a job chauffeuring Trump’s limo. Maybe they’ll all rally again if he runs again in 2020. But Trumpism will need new leaders and a real activist base if it’s going to be more than a tendency or a temptation going forward.

Then second, even if Trumpism finds the leadership and foot soldiers to fight a longer civil war, it’s very hard to see a classic realignment following. That’s because it’s hard to imagine either Republican faction — the Trumpist populist nationalists or the movement conservatives who currently oppose him — swinging into the Democratic coalition the way George Wallace’s voters eventually joined the G.O.P. and Rockefeller Republicans joined the Democrats.

Yes, if Trump is the nominee some Republican foreign policy hawks, Wall Street types and suburban women will likely vote for Hillary; if Trump isn’t the nominee, some modest chunk of his blue-collar base might pull the lever for the Democrat. But overall the Obama-Hillary Democrats don’t want, and more importantly don’t think they need, the votes of either Trump-supporting working class whites who oppose immigration and affirmative action or Trump-hating religious conservatives or libertarians or Jack Kemp disciples. Given present demographic trends, they could be right.

Nor would a not-Trump center-right party be obviously attractive to large constituencies on the center-left, unless it abandoned many of the very ideological principles currently inspiring resistance to Trump’s progress.

So a Trumpian schism probably wouldn’t lead to a full realignment, a real re-sorting of the parties. Instead it would likely just create a lasting civil war within American conservatism, forging two provisional mini-parties — one more nationalist and populist, concentrated in the Rust Belt and the South, the other more like the Goldwater-to-Reagan G.O.P, concentrated in the high plains and Mountain West — whose constant warfare would deliver the presidency to the Democrats time and time again.