If Donald Trump started his own TV channel, he would quickly find that coverage of him would dry up at other conservative outlets, which would see such him as a competitor. PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW HARRER / BLOOMBERG / GETTY

Donald Trump has always seemed more interested in being on TV than in being President. While he has never managed to acquire even a rudimentary understanding of foreign policy, he is a master of gaining attention.

Since he entered the Presidential race, in June, 2015, Trump has dominated the television coverage of it, which, perhaps more than anything else, helped him win the Republican primaries. “The whole strategy was predicated on using mass communication and free media to counteract the paid media attacks on him, which worked pretty good, to my surprise,” one longtime adviser told me.

As Trump’s chances of victory in the general election have become vanishingly small, many observers have speculated that his most obvious post-election plan would be to start some kind of media venture. A cable network, for example, would keep his populist base engaged and act as a hub of opposition to both the Hillary Clinton White House and the Republican establishment. Trump’s thirty-five-year-old son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who some Trump insiders describe as Trump’s real campaign manager, is a budding media entrepreneur who owns the New York Observer. The idea made even more sense once Roger Ailes, the former head of Fox News—who left the network after accusations of sexual harassment—reportedly became a Trump adviser and once Steve Bannon, the former head of the right-wing news site Breitbart, became the C.E.O. of the Trump campaign.

Today, the Financial Times reported that all the speculation about Trump TV may not be so crazy. The F.T. says that, according to three sources, Kushner “has informally approached one of the media industry’s top dealmakers”—Aryeh Bourkoff, the founder of LionTree, a private investment bank—“about the prospect of setting up a Trump television network after the presidential election in November.” Both Kushner and Bourkoff declined to comment to the newspaper. (Update: A source who is familiar with the conversation between Kushner and Bourkoff told me this afternoon, “There was no proposal, no follow-up. LionTree would not be interested.”)

There’s little doubt that the current Trump team is planning to build some kind of media and political infrastructure for Trumpism in the likely event that he loses. But there are several reasons to doubt that it could get a full-scale cable news network off the ground.

In recent years, several Trump-like personalities have tried to transform their populist shtick into a television venture and have failed. First, there was the Sarah Palin Channel, which lasted less than a year. Glenn Beck, who once led the anti-Obama conspiracy theorists on the right, had a popular show on HLN and then Fox News, but his Blaze TV project has been in a death spiral this year.

Recent newcomers to cable news, like Bloomberg and Fox Business Channel, have also failed to take off. Outside of conservative and news media, networks designed around a single person are no easier to sustain. Even the Oprah Winfrey Network, a cable channel with hundreds of millions of dollar in startup funds, created, in 2011, by one of the most popular personalities in America, has struggled to post impressive ratings.

Trump’s entire strategy this year has been premised on the fact that he doesn’t need to spend much money on television ads because he can get free airtime whenever he needs it. He constantly brags about his ability to reach millions of supporters at no cost through his social-media accounts. If Trump did start his own news channel, he would quickly find that coverage of him would dry up at places like Fox News, which would see such a Trump enterprise as a competitor.

It also seems highly unlikely that Trump—who is loath even to spend money on polls because he believes there are plenty of public ones he can have for free—would suddenly cough up tens and perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars to enter the fraught business of cable TV. It’s also improbable that someone who brags about how much money he has could find others to finance such a risky venture, especially given Trump’s long trail of failed businesses (Trump Airlines, the Trump Taj Mahal, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Magazine).

Even Trump’s closest advisers are skeptical that cable news is the right path. I recently talked to a top Trump campaign official who has studied the cable news business closely, and he argued that it was a foolish endeavor.

“Roger Ailes is the most brilliant guy in this business,” the official said. “He put seven hundred fifty million a year into Fox Business. He put the best guys you’ve got, like Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo. In the early afternoon, there are more people on Breitbart’s home page than are watching Fox Business. Look at the guys at Bloomberg. And these are brilliant TV guys. That business breaks people.”

Trump is certainly not going away, but there are good reasons to suspect that you won’t find Trump TV on your cable box anytime soon.