If Trump narrowly loses, who will his apprentice be?

[Lyin' Steve]

Let's say Trump gets 1225 delegates on the first ballot.  After days of rage and much wailing and gnashing of teeth, he goes down to 940 on the second ballot, and loses to Ted Cruz on the third.  The GOP is torn asunder and loses in a landslide to Hillary Clinton in November.  But that doesn't really matter.

What matters is, Trump obviously found a new way to campaign this cycle that worked extremely well.  In spite of his obvious, obvious flaws and weaknesses he's dominated the primary.  Come 2018 every prospective presidential candidate will be looking back at this election and thinking, hey I'm more knowledgable and disciplined than Trump, I bet I could execute the same strategy and take down Hillary.

As for Trump himself, it's pretty obvious it's now or never for him personally.  But I definitely wouldn't put it past him to have a young, charismatic protege politician run in 2020 using all the lessons Trump has taught him.  The presidential apprentice, if you will.  He'd probably drop hints about it in 2017 or 2018 and prospective apprentices would flock to Trump Tower the way they flock to Camp Koch now, but they're not begging for money, they're begging to learn his skills in media savvy, branding, knife-fighting and reaching the hearts and minds of the voters.

So let's say this all plays out.  Who would Trump pick?

[Higgs]

Ben Sasse will come home to daddy.

[Vosem]

There'll be politicians trying to appeal to ex-Trump supporters (I think Christie especially is trying to be a successor-candidate in 2020), but no one is going to adopt the Trump style fully. Partly because certain aspects of it are unique to Trump and cannot be copied (the media domination requires a background being a celebrity, and getting taken seriously as a presidential candidate requires some sort of background in either business/politics/the military; nobody I can think of besides Trump can check both boxes except maybe Joe Scarborough, who is nowhere near exciting enough to be a Trump-successor; I don't watch much television and am open to other ideas, though), and partly because the Trump style, taken as a whole, doesn't really work -- Trump's victory in the primaries now (which is probably likelier than not after last night, but still isn't completely a done deal) was entirely due to the split field and the missteps of his opponents; and Trump's style in a general election simply does not work.

Wordy paragraph, but a very important point to be made.