Officials for President Donald Trump's campaign are increasingly pessimistic about their chances of getting the needed 270 electoral votes, and many of them are already pointing fingers at one another.
According to Axios's Jonathan Swan, "three senior Trump advisers who recently talked to campaign manager Bill Stepien walked away believing he thinks they will lose" the 2020 race, despite Trump's shock come-from-behind victory against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Furthermore, sources tell Swan that "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" over the past several weeks.
Some campaign sources tell Swan that they are baffled by the campaign's decision to continue "half-assed" ad spending in Wisconsin even though the campaign now believes that state is already out of reach.
However, defenders of Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien tell Swan that he's still spending miniscule amounts in out-of-reach states because he knows "Trump would inevitably blow up at him if he were to read newspaper stories that he was going off the air in a Rust Belt battleground."
In fact, many of Swan's sources say that Trump, not Stepien, is primarily to blame for the campaign's fading fortunes.
"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."