Donald Trump is going through the stages of grief over a growing defiance of him and his movement. The possibility of Democrats retaking power and investigating him triggered the first phases: denial and anger. Last week, he entered the “bargaining” phase, as evidenced by his son-in-law taking a secret meeting with a top House Democrat, evidently in an effort to find common ground.

But I can tell you — from 10 years of watching Trump’s movement, first inside his administration and then battling it from the outside at close quarters — that he’s harbouring a deeper worry than being investigated by liberals. He fears his fellow conservatives even more – because he knows we’re the ones who beat him last time.

He has good reason to remember. In the autumn of 2020, I helped organise a wave of former Trump administration officials to come out publicly against the president we’d served. Our ranks included cabinet officials, intelligence chiefs, and once-loyal White House staff who saw behind the curtain and couldn’t accept the thought of Trump’s re-election. CNN’s Jake Tapper devoted an hour-long special to the historic defections, just weeks before election day.

“The world has never before witnessed so many former top US government officials warning about the president for whom they once worked,” he told viewers. “It’s just never happened before. Not in these numbers. And not with the same stark conclusion that President Trump in their view is unfit for the office he holds.”

Trump still blames many of us for costing him that election. While the credit does belong solely to ex-officials and Republicans who turned against him and barnstormed the country, his paranoia isn’t entirely misplaced. The data afterwards showed a meaningful slice of Republican voters crossing over for Joe Biden (plenty of them for the first time in their lives) in the handful of states that decided the outcome. Those voters were not won over by Democrats. It was fellow Republicans who gave them the air cover to do it.

Political scientists have a name for this phenomenon. They call it a “permission structure”. Most people don’t change their vote because the other side made a great argument. They change it when somebody they already trust — someone who shares their tribe — tells them it’s all right to flip. A Democrat telling a lifelong Republican that Trump is unfit for office is pretty much just background noise. But a Republican who sat in the Trump White House and saw the corruption? That’s permission. We built that structure in 2020, and it worked in a way no Democratic attack ad could.

Now it’s being rebuilt on two fronts at once. reported this week on a small but telling group of former Republicans who are running as Democratic candidates against Trump’s close allies: Nancy Lacore, a 35-year Navy veteran in South Carolina; Rebecca Bennett, a Navy helicopter pilot in New Jersey; former TV anchor Janelle Stelson in Pennsylvania; and David Jolly, an ex-Republican congressman running for governor of Florida.

Full disclosure: Jolly is a good friend. We worked closely together in the aftermath of the first Trump administration to make sure the “Republican resistance” didn’t die. Of course, Trump tried to kill it off, working hard to purge the party of folks who cost him re-election the first time. Now as a gubernatorial candidate, Jolly reckons something like 31 per cent of Florida is hardened Maga and simply unavailable to him. But that’s not his focus. He’s going after disaffected conservatives and independents who are worn out by Trump. That’s the right move.

Permission structures don’t need to convert the hardcore base. To be effective, they only need to peel off the edges, and in a midterm that will be decided in a few dozen districts, the edges are everything. Poll after poll shows that Trump’s support among Republicans has been sinking since the start of his second term. Meanwhile, he has a miserable 25 per cent approval rating among independents. In 2020, just a few points of erosion in a few states was the whole ball game.

That’s one front — the ex-Republicans who are running against his hand-picked candidates. But the second front is the one that truly torments him. That’s the insider threat, within the Maga movement itself.

At the start of this month former Maga congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene posted a photograph from hyper-conservative Tucker Carlson’s home in Maine. Carlson sat at the head of the table, playing host to Greene, Maga Congressman Thomas Massie, and Trump’s former counterterrorism chief Joe Kent.

“The movement has begun,” she wrote, accusing Trump of betraying them all on his promise of no more foreign wars. Carlson has vowed to build a third party. That photograph is what triggered another anger phase, which culminated in a late-night Truth Social eruption in which Trump branded Greene a traitor, Massie a jerk, Carlson irrelevant, and the three of them “LOSERS ALL”. Greene fired back that he was a Trojan horse and that she wished she had never supported him.

If Trump felt confident and secure in his support from the base, he wouldn’t spend a Friday night dictating hundreds of words of insults at a former congresswoman and a podcaster. He’s doing it because he understands what they represent. Greene, Carlson and Massie are genuine threats. They’re speaking directly to the people who bought the red Maga hats, and they are telling the masses that it’s all right to walk away. That’s the beginning of a new permission structure for defection inside Maga itself.

Whatever Trump is planning for November (and I suspect it involves pushing the limits of his office further than most people expect), it all depends on a base that doesn’t fracture. Right now, it’s fracturing in public, which is why his son-in-law consigliere is suddenly taking meetings in Manhattan with Democrats in a desperate bid to bargain their way out of a dark political future.

If I have any advice for the Republicans now breaking with Trump, it’s about messaging. They shouldn’t quibble with him on specific policies. Those of us who tried that in 2020 learned it only goes so far. The message that moves people is more personal: “You were deceived. You were betrayed. You were taken advantage of.” Voters will put up with a bad leader for a long time, but what they’ll grow weary of is a grifter who’s taking their money and laughing at them on the way out the door. Greene, to her credit, seems to have worked this out already. Her words (“He betrayed us all”) land harder than anything the Democratic National Committee has produced this election cycle.

Trump built his movement on the idea that criticising him is treason. His former allies are busy proving that it isn’t. And if they are successful, then Trump’s last two stages of grief — depression and forced acceptance — will be scheduled for the first week of November.