They may not be discouraged but without trump there won't be anybody left to focalize their anger. It will be like a myopic guy losing his glasses.
Why do you think they need someone to represent their anger?
I would recommend you look back through the modern history of conservatism in America. The alt-right is basically the latest incoming wave of the Conservative Movement, and they become more intensely detached from reality all the time.
Remember the conservative wave of the '90s? They were bringing back "family values" and "small government." In reality, they were selling the country up the river (indeed, Democrats like Bill Clinton certainly helped, too). Their leaders were scumbags--think Newt Gingrich. They hadn't yet
completely departed from reality, though. They knew where society was and where it was going, but their intention was to push back and make America more like their imagined 1950s white suburbia.
Once George W. Bush got into office, of course, he got us involved in multiple wars and produced the most conservative-friendly domestic agenda since Reagan. It was in this era that we really started to see a split, though. Bush himself was cut from a mold not dissimilar to his father or Reagan, but he found himself at odds with a more conservative Congress that parted ways with him on issues like immigration. They were already steeped in climate change denial, they rejected plenty of mainstream science, and at the fringes you had the Alex Jones "9/11 was an inside job" set. This was only the beginning.
Republicans lost Congress in 2006, but they weren't smarting too hard because the Dems didn't have
that big of an edge, and they still had Bush in the White House. They hadn't completely lost their shit--it took Obama's election to do that. Notice how the Tea Party, which really ramped up after Obama got elected, didn't need a leader on their side in order to wreak lots of havoc. All they needed was a focal point for their anger in the form of Barack Obama. Hillary Clinton will no doubt serve the very same purpose.
And while the Tea Party brought an unprecedented era of obstructionism, at least they had a coherent ideology: government is too big, we're taxed too much, time to grind the wheels to a halt and shrink the beast. I wholeheartedly disagree with this, but it's an identifiable belief system. It involves comprehensible strategies and rhetoric.
The alt-right sees what was once the fringe get moved to center stage. Republicans used to have to keep their bigotry and xenophobia on the down-low. They used dogwhistles like "inner cities" and "law and order" and "welfare queens" and "violent criminals" when they're really talking about coming down hard on black people. They say "pro-life" when they mean "men controlling women's bodies." They say "family values" when they mean "gay people must be stigmatized and ostracized." They understood that naked bigotry simply didn't fly with the American mainstream.
Well, the alt-right doesn't get that. They think most Americans agree with them and are just afraid to admit it. We have a Presidential candidate who is beloved by honest-to-god white supremacists and neo-Nazis. He promises to round up millions of people and deport them, and they love him for it. He promises to register, control, and ban Muslims, and they love him for it. He promotes a foreign policy that amounts to the US stomping all over the globe, including through the use of nukes, and they
love it, because it's
strong. These are people who don't live in anything resembling reality. They live in a world where they believe white men in particular are under existential threat from Mexicans, from black people, from Muslims, from basically the entire world. They see conspiracies everywhere, reject anything they consider "mainstream" because it's tainted by George Soros or Reptilians or chemtrails or fuck knows. They praise a man who brags about sexual assault. They want a man who very clearly desires a dictatorship and would use any means at his disposal to crush dissent and criticism, and seems thrilled by the idea of abusing and killing lots of people.
The point is, the right-wing in the US has gone from something I don't agree with but which at least sort-of inhabited a reality I recognize, to some kind of mass psychosis where there's disagreement about basic facts. I say man-made climate change is real; they say it's a plot by the Chinese to destroy America. You can't reason with that, and those attitudes are too dangerous to have wielding government power. But the trend is real, and I think people are kidding themselves if they believe it's just gonna go away when Trump loses.
2018 may end up being a very,
very ugly year, to say nothing of 2020.
