'Bad as it gets': GOP insiders reveal their true feelings about being stuck on Trump's 2020 'hell ship'

Polls show that President Donald Trump is trailing former Vice President Joe Biden badly in the 2020 presidential election, and many Republican insiders are fretting that the president will bring down Senate Republicans with him.

Writing in Rolling Stone, longtime GOP operative and current anti-Trump conservative Tim Miller quotes several Republican campaign staffers who are expressing a real sense of dread at where Trump is taking their party heading into November.

"Every shred of evidence points to a likely ass kicking in the fall," said one operative.

"Well it’s as bad as it gets right now," commented another.

However, these Republicans say that they have little choice but to stick with the president since their base voters all demand unquestioning loyalty to him and everything he does.

"There are two options, you can be on this hell ship or you can be in the water drowning," one Republican explained.

"There are practical realities -- we ran a bunch of red district primaries, and it would come back that the number-one issue for 80+% of Republican primary voters was loyalty to Donald Trump," claimed another. "I’m not making that number up."

These operatives say they're even concerned about Trump not only losing Texas but taking Sen. John Cornyn down with him. This anxiety is especially acute because Cornyn does not have the luxury of angering the president's followers.

"You have 25% of the state is rural and Trump gets like Saddam Hussein level numbers here," they explained. "87% in 25% of the state... Cornyn gets 69. And so Cornyn can’t find a place to break from because he could really put that in jeopardy."

Read the whole piece here.