An advisor to President Donald Trump has broken with the upbeat messaging coming out of the White House concerning the midterms and warned it is unlikely to turn out well for Republicans.

“It’s obviously going to be f***ing rough,” the unnamed Trump aide told CNN, saying they believed the best possible outcome would be a mirror-image repeat of the 2022 elections, when incumbent president Joe Biden lost the House of Representatives but did cling on to the Democratic majority in the Senate.

The network reports that the mood among Trump’s inner circle has “soured” over their party’s prospects come November 3 – as the advisor’s outburst suggests – with few seeing much hope of the president managing to convince swing voters or “persuadable” independents to come out for the GOP’s candidates.

Trump has insisted on putting himself front and center of midterms campaigning and told his supporters to treat the vote as if he were on the ballot and as a referendum on his second presidency, gambling on their feeling positive about his record.

He has also repeatedly insisted that a new golden age is just around the corner – doing so most recently in a series of taxpayer-funded “public service announcements” – while shrugging off surveys indicating the public remains concerned about the cost of living and his Iran war, which has driven up the cost of gas by hindering global oil shipments.

Trump may habitually reject unfavourable polling as “fake” but that does not mean it does not continue to pour in, with CNN’s data guru Harry Enten recently highlighting a 50 percent job disapproval rating.

“They don’t just dislike him,” Enten said of the voters surveyed. “There’s record hatred for the president of the United States going into a midterm.”

That figure rose to 56 percent among independents, the group Republicans are seeking to persuade over to their side.

So toxic is the polling around Trump that he is being left out of candidates’ midterm TV spots, dropped from their websites and even asked not to turn up to stump for them.

A GOP official cited by CNN brushed off the significance of those moves, saying candidates “need to run the races they need to run, and we’re obviously encouraging them to do what they need to do.”

“The cake is already baked,” they added. “There’s no getting away from Trump for these guys. So we have to lean into it.

“The left is going to attack [Republican candidates] as being close to Trump no matter what, so why not get the benefit out of it, which is max turnout.”

While the officials cited by the network characterized the vote as a “turnout game,” one also acknowledged that the strategy could backfire given that the president is such a polarizing figure.

“The issue with putting his name on the ballot is it could ultimately serve as a bigger driving force for Democratic voters who hate him,” they said.

Campaign staff nevertheless told CNN they have a strategy in place, based on a “massive data operation,” to send out Trump and Vice President JD Vance to key battlegrounds and red states throughout October, beginning with warm up events in Alabama and Oklahoma next week.

“He’ll be playing hard in Florida, Texas, Michigan and Ohio – he’ll be on the road just about every day in October campaigning. We’re leaving it all on the table,” one operative said.

White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told The Independent: “No one can dispute the fact that President Trump has created one of the most robust coalitions in political history with the MAGA movement, and the president understands how to communicate with them.

“President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress… The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats’ extreme liberal policies and obstruction.”

A White House official also told The Independent that the president is “still the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party” and said there is “absolutely no distance” between Trump and the GOP’s candidates, pointing to a recent Economist/YouGov highlighting his popularity among MAGA voters.

Further evidence of the sour mood was provided by another campaign operative, who, when asked what the GOP can do to improve their prospects for November, answered: “Go back in time and never start the war with Iran.”