Three senior Trump advisers who recently talked to campaign manager Bill Stepien walked away believing he thinks they will lose.
The big picture: The Trump campaign is filled with internal blaming and pre-spinning of a potential loss, accelerating a dire mood that's driven by a daily barrage of bleak headlines, campaign and White House officials tell me.
"A lot of this is the president himself," one adviser said. "You can't heal a patient who doesn't want to take the diagnosis." Behind the scenes: In weekly pep talks, Stepien tells staff members why they shouldn't pay attention to the perennially horrible public polls — and how they can "win the week" and the campaign.
But in other private conversations, described by multiple sources, Stepien can seem darkly pessimistic. He likens the campaign to an airplane flying through turbulence, saying: "It's our job to safely land the plane." Three sources who have heard Stepien use variations of the airplane analogy say they sensed he was deeply, perhaps irretrievably pessimistic about the state of the race. "It's not a great feeling when you get the sense the campaign manager doesn't deep down think we're going to win," one campaign source said. Stepien pushed back strongly on that, telling me on Friday morning: "With each day closer to November 3, our campaign data presents a clear pathway to 270 for the President that provides me more confidence than ever in President Trump's re-election."
"Our campaign knows how President Trump was elected in 2016 and more importantly, we know exactly how he's going to do it again," Stepien added.
[continued at link--worth reading, it's a shit show in MAGAstan]