“Your vote in 2018 is every bit as important as your vote in 2016,” Donald Trump said at an event hosted by the Susan B. Anthony List back in May, reading dutifully from a teleprompter. Then, he went off script: “Although I’m not sure I really believe that . . . I don’t know who the hell wrote that line,” he said with a grin, as the audience laughed. Trump has maintained this same level of swagger for most of the summer, defiantly smacking down talk of Democrats winning the House in the midterms as more mainstream-media nonsense. (“RED WAVE!” he tweeted at one point.) In doing so, of course, he may have pacified the same voters Republican operatives are eager to rev up. “They’re like, ‘Oh, to hell with this crap, we were told Trump wasn’t going to win [in 2016]. It’s bullshit,’” a worried G.O.P. strategist fretted to Axios.

It’s a problematic dynamic for a president who is allergic to facts that don’t go his way. In reality, all signs point to a crushing wave election, with not even a roaring economy enough to boost Trump’s dismal approval rating. “At this stage of the game, losing the House is the most likely proposition,” a G.O.P. strategist with clients on the ballot recently told David M. Drucker for the Hive. “It’s just a matter of how bad it gets.”

In public, Trump maintains his reality distortion field. But behind the scenes, a grim fatalism seems to be sinking in. “What he’s figured out is that his name is on the ballot in 2018,” a source who’s discussed the midterms with Trump told Axios. “His name is on the ballot as it relates to 2020, but more important he realizes his name is on the ballot as it relates to what life is going to be like for the next two years.” Democrats are preparing to make life a living hell for Trump, if they take back one or both houses of Congress. Republicans have already begun circulating a list of possible Democratic investigations into the administration, which features such bullet points as “President Trump’s tax returns,” “The travel ban,” and “Jared Kushner’s ethics law compliance.” The list, Jonathan Swan reported last month, “has churned Republican stomachs.” “If Republicans lose the House, the president will pivot and say it’s not a big deal, and make the case that he won regardless, because he lost fewer seats than past presidents,” a knowledgeable Republican told Drucker. “He will not fully understand the incredible headache it will be, in terms of House oversight, but he’ll quickly realize why it’s idiotic not to care.”

There is something to be said for the fact that Trump has arrived at this realization before D-day—“Over time he’s realized [that control of the House] can make all the difference in the world,” the source who’s discussed the midterms with Trump told Axios—and that he’s already attempting to seize control of the narrative. “He has repeated to folks that, if the Democrats impeach him, it would be a victory, politically, because it would be a complete overreach and he could exploit it and run against it in 2020.” It’s the same line being parroted among Trump allies, who have become convinced that an impeachment push by House Democrats would backfire, giving Trump a clear path to re-election—voters, they hypothesize, will be turned off by extremist posturing, and will instead flock to the middle of the road.

Of course, it’s one thing for Trump to extol the benefits of impeachment when the possibility is still at arm’s length. It’s another for a notoriously thin-skinned president to attempt to operate under siege. “This president is not interested in being an impeached president,” the source who’s talked to Trump told Axios. “His ego would not tolerate such a thing.” Trump’s worst traits—his egotism, his paranoia, his obsession with loyalty, his tendency to lash out—would only be exacerbated in an environment in which he’s constantly under attack. Governance would become, if possible, even more unworkable. Whether or not he has that possibility in mind, Trump has already found a scapegoat. “We’ll worry about [impeachment] if it ever happens,” he told a crowd in Montana last week. “But if it does happen, it’s your fault—because you didn’t go out to vote.”