We are in the last days of Donald Trump, presidential candidate. But as his defeat becomes more assured, the anxiety about his political afterlife is mounting. Liberals fear a world where he refuses to concede and his supporters turn to violence. Conservatives fear a world where the Republican Party remains imprisoned in his short-fingered grasp. Fox News executives fear a world where Trump starts a cable channel and steals their audience out from under them. And his supporters imagine that like a populist Obi-Wan Kenobi, he will rise more powerful than before.

There is no question that Trump will haunt the country, and especially the Republican Party, long after the votes are counted on Nov. 8. But the Trump phenomenon will not sustain itself automatically at anything like this scale, and there are ways in which Trump could fade into the celebrity-industrial background of our culture rather more swiftly than many people think.

Start with the worst-case scenario for the election, from the point of view of civics and civil peace: Trump refuses to concede defeat, rants about voter fraud, denounces Republican officialdom for betraying him, and urges his supporters to storm polling places and take to the streets. It’s possible to imagine this message leading to spasms of violence, and thence to a future of armed clashes between Trumpist militias and left-wing protesters like the ones who flooded Trump’s Chicago rally earlier this year. (The Week’s Damon Linker imagines something along these apocalyptic lines in a recent column.)

But if Trump loses in three weeks by the largest landslide in post-Reagan political history, it’s also possible that such a “to the barricades” rant could look a bit, well, ridiculous even to his deepest-dyed supporters. Not that some of them won’t embrace conspiracy theories and cheer on a Trumperdammerung online. But it’s not clear that the keyboard warfare and Twitter anti-Semitism of some of Trump’s supporters translate into a widespread appetite for flesh-and-blood confrontations with either law enforcement or the left.