MEGYN KELLY (HOST): But where do they go? What do they do with that loyalty when he's no longer running for office?
CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER: Well that will depend on him. He has himself a plurality of Republicans, not a majority as we saw in the primaries, but he's got a sizable chunk larger than anybody else's. So the question is what does he want to do with it? Is he going to be Cincinnatus or George Washington and ride away into the sunset? If you lose a presidential election in American history especially in modern American history, you're gone. There's no Mondale or Dukakis. You have your chance, you lose, you don't show up again. But that would be different with Trump. He sort of created or he discovered his own constituency. They feel they have nowhere else to go. If he does not walk away, then he can do a lot with that constituency, particularly as we saw in the Bloomberg article if he has the mechanics, if he owns the data, if he has a way to e-mail and reach all of them and even if he doesn't he can simply use Twitter or Facebook.
So, he can shape it into a movement either to run again for reelection, to influence the midterm elections, to influence the current politics. If Trump decides to stay in --in the game, the first test will be whether he can successfully bring down Paul Ryan who has become a nemesis of his and then we'll know how transitive is his influence.
[...]
KRAUTHAMMER: But we know one thing from his entire life history, he loves the spotlight, he finds it hard to be away from it. And even though he said at the beginning, if I lose I'll go back to my old life, I don't think -- well I don't know. He'll decide, but it is likely he'll be changed and he will have acquired a powerful instrument, a political instrument. He didn't have that before he ran. And he can use it, he could use it commercially, for example, with a TV station or a TV network or some other use in the media or he can do it politically in which case he mobilizes his people to influence elections and perhaps his own later on. It's extremely tempting because he built this essentially on his own and out of nowhere and he's got a lot of options. He's not the retiring type, you might have noticed.
