I don’t think there’s any figure with anywhere near the broad appeal Trump had (very much past tense) to voters of a certain type, so anyone replacing him is going to be preaching to a much-reduced church. Tucker Carlson, for example, some people think will be the next Trump, but it’s just not realistic. He doesn’t have that broad appeal, he’s obviously the mouthpiece for views not his own, and doesn’t have that clownish natural ability, nor the whole mafioso mannerisms of Trump (which bizarrely endeared him to a lot of people). He doesn’t seem like some funny uncle like Trump could, he seems like a creepy cousin who is in a weird religion (even though he isn’t, particularly, he just has that manner).
And this is an issue with a lot of the potential “next Trump” figures - they’re creeps in a way Trump wasn’t, and they read as extremists, rather than agreeable.
As for being an Alex Jones-esque figure, the problem is Trump only cares about Trump. He’s never going to interview other people, and he’s not interested in discussing other people’s theories with them, only his own, which means he’s ill-suited to that kind of role. He may well attempt such a thing, but I don’t think he’ll be terribly successful.
You know how many times this has been attempted, with how much money? It’s an awful lot, in both cases, because virtually every time Nazis get banned from anywhere, their response is “We’ll just build our own, how hard can it be?”. But the fundamental problem is almost impossible to overcome - if you start by attracting far-right and alt-right users, then very few other people will join your social network, at which point it becomes entirely pointless. Further, as the fate of Parler shows, too, if you let them do what they want to do on a social network, i.e. spew poorly-spelled hate speech, death threats, insurrection plans, and so on, your app gets pulled from the Play and Apple stores. So 98% of users don’t even have a clue how they’d install it (indeed it’s basically impossible on iPhone).
So how would “more money” and “it’s own infrastructure” solve those two fundamental problems, that being that your users drive other users away, and your product cannot be accessed on conventional mobile phones and similar devices? Especially by non-technical users, which is vast majority of your potential aging userbase. On top of that, there’s the problem that, right now, normal users don’t generally find themselves having “free speech issues” on Twitter or Facebook. Those people who do are usually behaving pretty damn badly. Like, Richard K. Morgan, the dude who wrote Altered Carbon (RIP), managed to get perma-banned from Twitter, but to do this, he not only had to decide to go on repeated bizarre anti-trans rants (super-bizarre given all his books are about body-swapping, about how genetics literally is not destiny, and so on) and they basically make death/violence threats at people mocking him and/or allowing his account to be used for ban evasion by others. His whole mental breakdown was very out-of-nowhere, resembling those 50/60/70-something sci-fi authors who went insane post-9/11 and suddenly became massive and very open bigots (and not just against Muslims).
So what would the endgame here even be for such a product? To segregate off all the nasty 50-somethings and younger outright bigots in their own mini-Twitter where they couldn’t influence anyone except each other? I mean… maybe that’s fine. Because the fundamental problem is, if they use the platform to be Very Naughty Boys, Google and Apple will just pull it from their stores.
I do think it’s possible some kind of “free speech network” which Nazis love will eventually appear and be broadly popular, but if it does, it’ll be because of stuff like the Tory party here trying to make it illegal (literally illegal, criminal) to criticise capitalism, and driving people on to such a platform when Twitter or Facebook or whatever decides to comply.
*= (as an aside, I find it grotesque that the press has given near-zero coverage to the fact that he’s been a hardcore drug addict for a long time, including most of his celebrity, which frankly I believe is responsible for a considerable fraction of his beliefs and behaviour - he was taking incredible levels of anti-anxiety meds, and if you hit those really hard, like he did, you can lose empathy and decency among other things.)
