Facing the prospect of major losses in the midterms, Republicans are quietly acknowledging that the best outcome for their electoral prospects would be for President Donald Trump to “disappear.” That is according to Miles Taylor, who served as Homeland Security Deputy Chief of Staff during Trump’s first term and said on Tuesday that a “pre-midterm panic” has taken hold inside the Republican Party over the president’s weak polling, his reluctance to spend money, and a “Trumpapalooza” convention that “no one wants.”

Taylor wrote about a recent encounter with “a prominent Republican – someone GOP candidates have flocked to for guidance for years,” who used a phrase that has been circulating among party members seeking reelection in November: “I wish he would disappear.”

“The reference is to Donald Trump, of course,” Taylor wrote. “Never before have Republicans had to campaign under the banner of such a weak figurehead, nor one so insistent on stapling his toxic brand to the party, whether the party likes it or not… By nearly every measure, my former boss enters this midterm election as the weakest President in the modern polling era.”

Taylor pointed to Trump’s historically low polling numbers, saying the president’s collapse among independents has been especially severe, falling from the mid-40s in 2018 to just 18 percent today. “Can the party get over that hump?” Taylor asked. “Not if history is any guide. There’s no modern precedent for a party facing numbers that bad and not getting walloped.”

He also pointed back to the 2018 midterms, when Trump’s numbers were significantly stronger than they are now. “Remember what happened in 2018, when Trump’s numbers were far better than they are today? I do. Behind the scenes, he was apoplectic,” Taylor wrote. “Democrats flipped 41 House seats in the midterms that year (the party’s biggest gain since the post-Watergate wipeout of 1974), and won the national popular vote by nearly nine points and almost 10 million ballots. That represented the largest raw margin in midterm history and the highest midterm turnout in a century – when Trump was 10 points above where he is now.”

Republicans are also worried about the Dallas “midterm convention” Trump has planned for September. Taylor said, “There’s never been such a thing; conventions are usually just for presidential election years. In fact, the Republican National Committee had to rewrite its rules in January to allow it. Now, the RNC chairman is openly billing the two-day event as a ‘Trumpapalooza,’ surely to the eye rolls of swing-state candidates, who would probably suffer less politically if they were spotted doing drugs at a music festival than if they were caught flashing forced grins and thumbs-up at a Trump carnival.”

Taylor said the financial side is equally troubling for Republican candidates. “Worse still for Republican candidates,” he wrote, “is that the man tying himself to their fate has been remarkably stingy with his money. Trump’s super PAC fundraising committee has amassed a war chest in excess of $400m. Of that, roughly $2.3m (about half a percent) has gone to help Republican candidates. Recent disbursements, according to federal filings, include consulting fees, bank charges and an event photographer. Bloomberg reported at the end of July that Trump had yet to approve spending a single dollar of it on the midterms, with his allies increasingly panicked that he never will.”

Taylor concluded that Republican candidates are in the worst possible position this year: tied closely to Trump’s weakening brand while receiving almost nothing from the large fund he controls. “They’re like the heirs to a billionaire who refuses to give his children an allowance but still insists on showing up at their parties, holding court and taking credit for everything they’ve ever done,” he wrote. “Which brings me back to the whispered prayers of swing-district Republicans, desperately wishing the President would go away this autumn because he’s a danger to the GOP brand.”