"Bottom has started to fall out": Trump campaign aides fret as Election Day "confidence has shifted"

About a dozen Donald Trump campaign aides spoke to Tim Alberta, a staff writer at The Atlantic, about how their candidate strayed from a hitherto on-message campaign to embark on a series of offensive, threatening and self-defeating verbal adventures that have left his team utterly demoralized heading into Election Day. The former president’s predictions of triumph, the reporter who has covered several Republican presidential campaigns concluded, belie a sense of panic among his subordinates that "the bottom has started to fall out" in their efforts. “I think that there is a real fear that the bottom has started to fall out here at the worst possible moment and that they are closing in about as weak a fashion as you possibly could.” In the article, campaign sources explain that Trump's newfound discipline unraveled as he succumbed to agitation over his campaign's cautious approach, advice from impatient allies like Corey Lewandowski and the aggravating itch of his natural impulses. “He does believe that he’s going to win,” Alberta told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Monday, adding that Trump "has a pretty distorted view of political reality, I think that’s been the case for quite some time.” The takeaway from his conversations, he said, was that the fall campaign had "been a total train wreck of a fall campaign for the Trump folks."