Who will be the face of the Republican Party in 2024, traditionalists or the fringes?

Conservative billionaire industrialist Charles Koch has had it. The GOP’s right flank has become intolerably violent and extreme, as it wanders the earth looking for an excuse to shoot their guns at everything from Baltimore power transformers to Chinese balloons.

It’s one thing to shoot up people, but to a tycoon, when you start shooting up infrastructure, that makes it personal. Have you priced wholesale repairs to the electrical grid lately?

So, like a playboy flashing a wad of bills at the bar, Koch has made it clear he will bankroll whichever candidate looks to have the best shot at knocking off Donald Trump in the coming GOP primary for the presidential nomination.

After six years of silence, he is bold enough to do this now, because he — like other institutional and media tea-leaf readers — see a greatly compromised Donald Trump, even more clownish than the cheesy superhero trading cards he’s been hawking of late.

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Koch’s gamble is that voters have grown “tired of winning” Trump-style, which, of course, means losing. Koch is gambling further that The Donald’s devotees are seeing Trump in the same light that he and his fellow elites see Trump — someone who has outlived his usefulness and must be quietly ushered off center stage.

This would be the dream scenario for the GOP, and probably for America, but it is fraught.

Trump, for one, has not shown a temperament conducive to being quietly ushered anywhere. Defeated fair and square in a primary, raise your hand if you think he would concede gracefully to the winning ticket and, in the spirit of goodwill and teamwork, devote himself to its success against President Biden in the fall.

More likely, he would either conduct a third-party run or implicitly discourage his followers from voting at all. Either would do terrible damage to the party (although there is always the chance that Democrats, ever helpful, will do the Republicans’ dirty work for them by indicting and driving a stake through the former president themselves).

Koch and his ilk are no-doubt hoping for a soft landing for the GOP — prune away the delirious and violent fringe without damaging Republican prospects on a national scale.

But while the far-right is a fringe in American politics as a whole, it may be more than that in the Republican party.

And as more extremists (the real RINOs) join the GOP, the more-traditional Republicans leave — giving the fringe an even-greater voice.

Koch’s brand of Republicanism depends on rules, societal order, which is pretty much the opposite of what the far-right wing of the party hopes to create. Extremist plans for descending on Baltimore in order to “completely lay this city to waste,” is the sort of right-wing activity that must keep people like Charles Koch up at night.

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So who is the face of the Republican Party, Charles Koch, or those who delight in shooting up infrastructure and the homes of political opponents? If you had to think about that question for more than five seconds, you have correctly identified the problem — and identified why the twain are unlikely to meet.

Trump, remember, has openly praised political acting-out. It is possible Trump’s legions will abandon him if they feel another candidate gives them a better chance at winning, but it seems equally possible they will see Koch as spewing the same elitism that they find so irritating in liberals.

Industrialists, media, religious institutions and political think tanks are all desirous of backing a winner for obvious reasons, usually economic gain. Having identified Trump as a loser who is no longer electable, they are eager to sweep him from the stage.

But Trump’s culture-warrior followers may not see things the same way. At times it can seem as if they would rather be angry losers than contented winners.

The majority of Trump voters presumably do not fall into this extremity, so for them, a candidate echoing Trump's policies sans the drama, violence and conspiracies might be a tempting alternative. For a third group of policy agnostics, Trump’s magnetic personality alone may be enough to keep them in the fold.

Despite what “experts” might predict, there is no way of knowing how this all plays out. The Civil War notwithstanding, history says the violence will die down, America’s boring institutions will prevail as always and the two-party system will survive as it always has — deeply flawed, but just effective enough.

But if Trumpian extremists refuse to fall into line and declare war on Chamber of Commerce Republicans, the venerable Grand Old Party itself could be rocked to the core. To find out who prevails, all we can do is wait.

The first primaries are still a year away, and we won’t know how this opera turns out until the Trump voters sing.

Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: GOP backers want Trump out in '24, but culture warriors could say no