Tim Alberta, a journalist and author who writes for The Atlantic, has been having conversations with people inside Trump’s circle for more than a year now. The culmination of that coverage came as a long-form article in that publication on Saturday, which we reported on for its inclusion of the reasoning behind Trump unceremoniously dumping his right-wing pal Laura Loomer from his campaign.

But MSNBC wanted a deeper look and a word with the author himself, so they had him on during a panel via remote video.

Fresh from an afternoon that Donald Trump spent speaking to a rally for an hour and a half that was about 70% full, the hosts asked Alberta about those conversations, which he’s characterized as “having gotten worse over time.”

For one thing, Alberta says, it may be dawning on Trump finally that he could be facing jail. For those who have forgotten Trump was convicted of 34 felonies in the one trial that has already concluded. He is literally out on bail right now, awaiting sentencing.

“There has always been this strange disconnect in the sense that people around Trump recognize that this election, certainly more than the other two, carries a certain existential consequence for Trump,” said Alberta.

“So, in one sense, you’re looking at that and thinking, well, nothing should concentrate the mind like the possibility of going to jail,” he continued, although he noted that his team doesn’t seem to have made that directly clear to the former president.

What his staff has said to him, however, was “Look, Mr. President, we got to bear down here. We have got to stay on message. If you do these things, if you deliver on these things that we are telling you to do, then we are going to win.”

And sometimes, says the writer, Trump almost seems like he might be listening.

Other times, however, “He almost seems determined to blow this thing up. He almost seems like he wants to see just how close he can get to self-destruction.”

Alberta said he was talking to someone on Friday who was “audibly distraught” — he could hear the fear in their voice. He said that they were “talking about how they can’t quite understand it, but for whatever reason, [Trump] is just in a dark place right now and just seems like he is closing this campaign on this really negative, violent note where they want to be running through the tape on this kind of positive unifying note.”

It sounds, however, like the insider that Alberta was speaking to was sad or upset because they’d worked so hard at getting Trump a real shot at winning, and he seems to be squandering it.

In other words, the unnamed conversation partner of Alberta’s was mad that they’re going to lose. But Trump himself is “in a dark place” for what I think is a very different reason. I think it’s the looming sentence, and the fact that he hasn’t been able to run this campaign exactly as he saw fit.

If Trump really is trying to sabotage his own campaign, he’s likely to want to go out in a blaze of glory, burning everything in his wake. But if he wants to avoid a lengthy prison sentence, he has to stifle that dark urge to start another riot, like he did on January 6, 2021.

That much is a given.

But for someone like Trump, stifling yourself is very rarely an option, as Alberta points out. In fact, that’s exactly the problem these campaign insiders have been discussing with the reporter.

The whole intent of the 2024 campaign — for his campaign apparatus, anyway — was to accept that there would be at least some of the traditional outbursts and freakouts and blowups we’ve seen come out of him for the last near-decade. But if they could only constrain it to a minimum, they thought, they could come out the other side with a win.

But as Alberta reported in The Atlantic piece, Trump has no interest in restraint.

Alberta reported that right after the Trump/Biden debate that ultimately led to Joe dropping out of the race and endorsing Kamala, Trump had what he thought was a great idea aboard the campaign plane: “The guy’s a ret*rd. He’s ret*rded. I think that’s what I’ll start calling him. Ret*rded Joe Biden.”

That may have been funny and even have seemed potentially effective to Trump, but his campaign spent days worrying that he would debut the new nickname, despite their pleading with him not to use it, at any given moment.

At a fundraiser a few days later, Trump remarked to those gathered: “People are calling this the most disciplined campaign they’ve ever seen. What’s discipline got to do with winning?”

As we know, not much for Donald Trump.

Watch the interview with Tim Alberta here: