On Wednesday, following the GOP’s historic midterm trouncing, party insiders laid out what they believe went wrong: President Donald Trump, they say, hired the “dumbest people” to manage the campaign. According to sources who spoke with New York Magazine’s Intelligencer, the fallout could bring about a “reckoning” in Trumpworld. Midterm elections, held halfway through a president’s term, have long functioned as referendums on the party in power, and defeats of this magnitude typically set off precisely the kind of internal accounting now playing out among Republicans.

“Susie Wiles, James Blair, and Chris LaCivita have proven themselves to be historic: losing South Carolina, Texas and Kansas,” one GOP strategist told the Intelligencer, naming three key members of President Donald Trump’s inner circle who played central roles in running the White House’s midterm efforts. “Trump has truly hired the dumbest people.”

According to the strategist and other Republican operatives, those in the president’s orbit had become “out-of-touch party elites getting rich while the rest of them staggered under catastrophic losses.”

Blame also flowed toward the party’s campaign apparatus. These committees serve as the party’s formal campaign arms, charged with candidate recruitment and resource allocation across House and Senate races — roles that place their leaders squarely in the line of fire when results fall short. One Republican operative, who had conducted polling in nearly every competitive House district, faulted National Republican Senatorial Committee Director Richard Hudson, who lost his North Carolina seat in a surprise upset to Richard Ojeda.

“Absolute embarrassment for Richard Hudson, Hudson’s NRCC, and the White House,” the operative said. “They hand-picked a lot of their candidates, took huge swings, such as starting the redistricting war, and it all blew up in their faces.”

Then there was the president himself. Republican staffers told the Intelligencer they were “mortified by a president they readily admit couldn’t have been more distant from voters’ concerns, which revolved around high prices stoked by an unnecessary war in Iran.”

One Trump-aligned strategist asserted that “it boils down to significant messaging failures across the board, failing to understand what’s important, in some cases just bad candidates... Significant unforced errors.”

Another operative noted that the GOP’s electoral bottom truly fell out after the Dallas midterm convention, and agreed that messaging was the central problem. “I don’t think it was because of the convention, but that convention coincided with when voters started paying attention, and what they saw was Trump focusing on everything except their own bottom lines and what would make their lives and their families’ lives better,” the operative said.

Trump’s closing pitch in front of the Reflecting Pool, where he spent most of his time ranting about disproven vandals and his unpopular renovation projects, proved the final nail in the coffin. “I think things like that are emblematic of what voters are frustrated by,” one operative explained. “Trump focused on vanity projects instead of continuing to focus on affordability and growing the economy.”

During the Reflecting Pool speech, a Republican official leading one of the top Senate campaigns sent the Intelligencer reporter a text that read simply: “Really something.”

The numbers, one insider said, showed just how angry voters across the political spectrum were. “Across the board, the shift among this demo that voted strongly for Trump is alarming, 30 to 40 points in a lot of places,” the insider said.

Such an abysmal failure, one Republican pollster asserted, should bring a “reckoning in Trumpworld.” “In any civilized society, we would set them on an ice float and push it out into the middle passage. But they’re like cockroaches,” the pollster argued.

Now, with the GOP forced to recover from an overwhelming defeat, the pollster offered a blunt assessment: “We’re at rock bottom.” The immediate question for the party is whether that reckoning translates into concrete changes in personnel and messaging, or whether the recriminations remain confined to anonymous quotes as Republicans begin rebuilding ahead of the next election cycle.

This article is based on reporting originally published by Alternet.