At some point in the near future, Donald Trump’s campaign career will come to an end. Should Trump win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination, it is exceedingly likely that he’ll lose the general election in November. Should Republicans manage to deny Trump victory at their nominating convention in July, he could mount a shell of an independent candidacy out of protest, or, perhaps more likely, take to the trail as the P.T. Barnum of an anti-establishment traveling circus.

But by the end of 2016, Trump will have to choose how politically relevant he wants to remain. And his decision will carry tremendous, lasting implications for the GOP.

For many years now, the Republican Party has functioned as a kind of pass-through entity for moneyed actors in the conservative movement, with little regard for the ultimate satisfaction of its own voters. Republicans were in some technical sense united, but widely disliked even by many self-identified conservatives and GOP voters. During the Obama years, GOP leaders reacted to these grievances by performatively mimicking conservative voter anger, and maximizing resistance to President Obama’s agenda.

Trump’s popularity as a candidate reveals the shortcomings of politics rendered entirely in pathos. A large subset of Republican voters didn’t want affect alone. They wanted their grievances addressed with specific deviations from Republican orthodoxy and strategy: more protectionism, more nativism, and the abandonment of innuendo in favor of explicit chauvinism and bigotry.

In the aftermath of Trump’s candidacy, these voters will either scatter back into a diffuse population of marginally attached voters, with little if any remaining love for the Republican Party, or they will become a more permanent fixture of American politics and an enduring source of disorder for GOP leadership.