Shortly after noon on Tuesday, after a morning in which President Trump challenged Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s I.Q. in an interview and insulted the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman Bob Corker’s diminutive stature in a tweet, I went to meet Ed Rogers, a lobbyist and lifelong Republican. “There’s fires all around,” Rogers told me, even before I sat down.

A couple of days earlier, Corker had gone public with an interview in the Times about President Trump, and Corker’s warning that Trump could put the country “on the path to World War III” seemed to have unleashed at least a few other Republicans to register varying degrees of disgust, dismay, fury, and disappointment about the perilous state of affairs in the Trump White House. Rogers, it turned out, was among them.

Rogers, who had returned on an early flight that morning to Washington, D.C., from Alabama, where he is from, is no flamethrower. A veteran of the Reagan White House, he had long ago partnered with Haley Barbour, the former Mississippi governor and Republican Party national chairman, to create one of Washington’s most successful access-and-influence businesses. Their clients include the governments of India and Ukraine and an array of blue-chip big businesses. He is just the sort of G.O.P. establishment type that Donald Trump ran against, but, while he was critical of Trump during the divisive G.O.P. primaries of 2016, he has tried hard to adjust to the new order. In recent months he has infuriated parts of the liberal blogosphere with his somewhat contorted efforts, in contributions to the Washington Post, to defend the President.

And yet when I met Rogers, at his usual table in the back of the room at Tosca, the expensive but understated Italian restaurant across the street from his lobbying firm, where he goes to lunch almost every day, he was in no mood to defend Trump. The constant tweeting, the personal attacks on his own team, were taking a toll. “Every week!” Rogers said. “It’s surreal.” Then he paused, almost groaning when he asked, “Why does it have to be this way?”

Republicans, I observed, seemed to be finding life under Trump a lot harder than Democrats, and Rogers agreed. “You want to be loyal,” he said. “You want to be a good member of the team.”

Rogers cited his partner Barbour’s dictum for surviving Washington under this volatile new President—sometimes Trump’s gonna help, sometimes he’s gonna hurt—before asking, “When is he going to help? Life is all about the net, not the gross. Where’s the help?” The confirmation of the Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, last spring, often cited as one of Trump’s major accomplishments, “seems like a long time ago,” Rogers said. “And is the totality of Trump still a net plus? Is it going to be a net plus?”

The weekend war of words between Corker and Trump had left Rogers, like many lobbyists in town, thinking not so much of the actual world war that Corker warned about (though he’s worried about that, too) but about the fate of Trump’s proposed tax-reform plan. Given Corker’s public skepticism about the proposal, Rogers and others now suspect that it may run into the same problems that blocked the repeal of Obamacare. “Is this what legislative momentum looks like?” he asked, before joking that perhaps “the flames and all are just a façade” and that, “behind it, Gary Cohn”—the President’s chief economic adviser—“is really doing magic and something big is coming together that is going to have fifty votes.”

Until now, Rogers and many other Washington Republicans have placed their hopes in the idea that sober-minded types like the new White House chief of staff, John Kelly, will somehow find a way to check Trump’s worst impulses, as was clear from a story he recounted. Rogers said that he remembered attending a session once with Steve Bannon, who was the President’s top White House strategist at the time, and who has returned to his previous roles as the chairman of the conservative news site Breitbart and scourge of the Party establishment. Bannon had said, as Rogers remembered it, “ ‘There’s a bunch of people who think they have to protect the country from Trump.’ He said it in a belittling way.” At this, Rogers shook his head again and told me, “Well, it’s not heretical to say such a thing and think such a thing.”

But now even that theory has been challenged by the President’s recent Twitter feuds. When I cited Corker’s comments that most Republicans at least privately shared the belief that the White House had been turned into an “adult day care” center for its capricious seventy-one-year-old chief resident, Rogers offered his own criticisms of the White House.

A sampling:

“They’re grasping at straws.”

“There is a permanent hunkered-down quality.”

“It’s shocking, it’s embarrassing.”

“They’re just making it up every day as they go along.”

And yet he hesitated when I asked whether Republicans agreed with Corker that Trump was dangerous. “I think the word ‘dangerous’ is still a rare word,” Rogers corrected me, saying that the words “reckless” and “destructive” were far more common. He went on, “Saying the D-word is different than believing there are now stewards of normalcy in [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions, in Tillerson, in Kelly, and others that, I think everybody acknowledges, are protecting institutions from Trump, and protecting Trump from Trump, for that matter.”

“The only thing that is reliable and dependable about Trump is that he’s unreliable and not dependable,” he added.

It’s tough to be a Republican in Washington these days. You’d think that winning the White House and both houses of Congress in an unexpected upset would have been good for the Party’s morale. But it has not turned out that way. In between beating up on Hillary Clinton and Mexicans and the “enemies of the people” in the press corps, the President has taken on members of his own party with particular relish.

Back in January, the conventional wisdom had been that Trump, a Washington novice with a clear disregard for the details, would leave the governing to Congress, making Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell perhaps the capital’s most important player. Now Trump and McConnell are barely on speaking terms, and tensions within the Party are proliferating. “Of course it’s personal,” Eliot Cohen, a former Bush Administration official who organized his national-security colleagues to sign open letters against Trump during the primaries, said. “These are the kind of rifts that don’t heal.”

For Washington Republicans, Corker’s public chastising of Trump has only increased the pressure: Are you speaking out? And, if not, why not? “I don’t think it’s responsible to hold back,” Richard Haass, the president of the Council on Foreign Relations and a veteran of both Bush Administrations, told me. “I don’t believe this is a time to hold back. A lot of people have gone along or stood there quiet when they disagreed. But not to weigh in when you actually do disagree seems to me wrong.”

It is now taken as axiomatic that the Washington wing of the G.O.P. loathes and fears Trump, but there are still genuine differences of opinion about how to deal with him. As a Republican veteran of Capitol Hill explained to me, “The taxonomy of Washington Republicans is not a bright line of Never Trump versus pro-Trump.” There is, instead, “a continuum of people who are to varying degrees either outright supportive of the President or comfortable with the fact that getting things done requires working with the Administration to outright disgust and opposition.” As I have found, and with the exception of a small handful of officials who came to town with Trump, the private comments of even the most publicly pro-Trump Republicans often differ little from their more outspoken colleagues.