ST. LOUIS — No candidate has entered a presidential debate so cloaked in disgrace or in a deeper hole than Donald Trump — and no candidate has ever been less prepared to face the most searing trial of his public life than the shaken Republican nominee.

The walls were already closing around Trump before the Friday release of a video in which he blithely described, in lurid and demeaning language, his efforts to seduce a married woman and how he would kiss and grope women even if they didn’t want him to. Those walls have now fallen in on him — and what aides were describing last week as an opportunity to rebound is now being cast as one final shot at survival.


“It is a complete sh-t show,” one GOP operative who still backs Trump said on Saturday, a day of mass defections by Republican women and down-ballot Senate and House candidates. “There’s one chance, one opportunity left — and that’s to get on bended knee and project the image of contrition. ... That’s not going to happen.”

A senior Trump aide described the mood of the campaign on Saturday evening as “very demoralized.”

The staggering events of the 72 hours leading up to Sunday’s showdown here with Hillary Clinton — capped by an unprecedented exodus of at least two dozen high-profile GOP supporters — would have posed an overwhelming challenge to any debate-prep team. But Trump doesn’t really have such a team in the conventional sense. Members of his rotating circle of advisers are confused about what to do, and the candidate is unwilling or incapable of preparing a game plan, Republican officials and people close to the campaign told POLITICO.

Even if Trump’s Friday fiasco had never happened, he’d still be in deep trouble, and his campaign remains in a state of disarray. In interviews conducted over the past week, campaign aides complained about improvised decision-making, and a lack of communication that often leads to mixed signals and confusion. With so few people on staff — Trump’s skeleton campaign is a fraction the size of Clinton’s massive Brooklyn operation— senior advisers are often scattered around the country on various assignments, making it hard to implement consistent messaging, a coherent communications strategy and a debate-prep system that will protect the vulnerable candidate.

There are also strategic differences — not irreconcilable, but significant — in his team.

After his stumble at Hofstra, Trump spent part of the following week traveling with Steve Bannon, the hard-charging Breitbart CEO now helping to steer the campaign. Bannon has been urging Trump to brand himself as a populist-minded change agent, a line that he used briefly and effectively during the Hofstra showdown. Over the course of the week, Trump reiterated the messaging on a number of stops, including ones in Florida, Iowa and Wisconsin, but it was largely lost amid his obsessive defense of comments ridiculing the weight of a former Miss Universe.

Some Trump aides saw the change-agent argument — and his criticism of Clinton as a failed reformer with a 30-year-record of disappointment — as his best moment in the debate, and some members of his new polling team, which has grown to a handful of people, also liked what they saw.

But, back in Trump Tower, two other members of the nominee’s senior team, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and son-in-law Jared Kushner, were pushing for the campaign’s ad-makers to produce scripts that would go after Clinton’s character — hard. Several focus groups were scheduled, including one in the critical North Carolina battleground, and the campaign wanted to test TV ads that attacked the former secretary of state as a corrupt figure and highlighted her use of a private email server.

The schism was on full display in Trump’s all-over-the-map public utterances after The Washington Post on Friday published the tape of Trump talking about sexually assaulting women because, as a celebrity, he could get away with it. He attempted contrition in videotaped statement, but immediately reverted to bellowing attacks on Bill Clinton coupled with threats to dredge up the former president’s affairs and lay them at his wife’s feet.

It’s that schism Clinton’s team will try to exploit on Sunday, as the Democrat challenges an occasionally policy-focused Trump on the issues while goading him into the kind of personal attacks on her husband, herself and other Americans that repel voters.

Despite the importance of pulling off what would amount to the most monumental pivot in history, Trump is proceeding toward Sunday night’s debate in his typical, disorganized way. Amazingly, he was still publicly musing about ditching a long debate-practice session for public appearances as late as this weekend.

Around a dozen debate advisers — none of them truly managing the process — were consulted ahead of the Hofstra showdown, many of them policy aides who were present to help the nominee beef up on topics that could arise. This time, the list is far smaller. Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie are leading the sessions, with help from campaign chairman Steve Bannon, campaign manager Kellyanne Conway and deputy campaign manager David Bossie.

Among those with minimized roles this go-round: Michael Flynn, the blunt-talking retired general who’s become a regular Trump surrogate.

Mike Pence — despite proving himself the master of the format in a disciplined performance against Tim Kaine in last week’s vice-presidential debate — is not playing a big part on Trump’s prep team, though he has been giving some advice on the side. Instead, since Friday, Pence appears to be distancing himself amid Hail Mary calls from GOP colleagues for the reality-TV star at the top of the ticket to step aside and make way for his more electable running mate.

While Trump and Pence advisers aggressively pushed back against reports that Trump was mad at Pence for out-performing him on the debate stage — “B.S.!” one Trump adviser said while others described Trump as “overjoyed” by the performance — there is not a lot of good feeling there now.

On Saturday, Pence — who has now denounced his running mate’s words about women — pulled out of a joint appearance with House Speaker Paul Ryan, unwilling to stand for the GOP nominee in the wake of Friday’s events.

Pence, according to a Republican familiar with his thinking, made the decision on his own and believes it doesn’t make sense for him to act a human shield until Trump addresses the issue more comprehensively than his defiant apology Friday night that came coupled with an attack on the Clintons. Pence delivered the news to Trump in a Saturday morning phone call. The conversation was cordial, and the Indiana governor has been checking in regularly to offer advice on how to handle the fallout, the Republican told POLITICO.

Those familiar with the St. Louis prep sessions say there’s been a focus on “tactics.” Republicans around Trump hope he’ll produce more succinct and less defensive answers, something that would have been difficult to pull off even if he had not been rattled and distracted by the firestorm over the tape.

That is the lesson the Republican nominee’s team took away from the first debate at Hofstra. After that debacle, Trump’s team ordered up a round of internal polling in about a half-dozen key battlegrounds: The results, said one person familiar with the numbers, weren’t catastrophic, but at the same time, they showed a clear drop for Trump, including in some red states that he had hoped to put away.

The Hofstra debate was particularly frustrating to Trump’s advisers, who say that the GOP nominee was sufficiently prepped for the showdown but simply didn’t use the tools he’d been given. One example: Trump was supplied with a list of “pivot points” he could use to redirect questions and establish contrasts with Hillary Clinton. The hope, Republicans said, was that he would parry questions about his refusal to release tax returns with sustained attacks on her use of a private email server, while raising questions about the Clinton Foundation.

Instead, he was caught flat-footed and offered rambling answers that made a rhetorical strongman look indecisive and defensive.

In the days that followed, Trump was bothered by a series of stories that depicted him as unfocused and unwilling to learn (although people around him confirmed the reports were largely accurate). His team has since tried to cut back on unwanted leaks. This week, Jillian Rogers, a Trump press aide, sent an email to staffers telling them to “As always, let us know if you are contacted for a campaign-related” story.

The second debate should have been easier for Trump, assuming he had made a commitment to prepare. But not, Republicans concede, after Friday.

“The stakes for Sunday's debate got much, much higher on Friday, and the degree of difficulty increased greatly as well,” said Beth Myers, a top aide and debate prep adviser for Mitt Romney in 2012.

“The town hall format should be a better venue for Trump, who is more comfortable interacting with an audience than one-on-one on stage with Hillary Clinton,” she said. But the prep, she cautioned, will be difficult “for Trump and his campaign team as they try to spin the virtually unspinnable hot-mic tape. Tough to get your head into debate mode while catching so much flak from every direction.”

Clinton’s people believe she’s the one who benefits most from the format, which features questions from undecided voters, in addition to queries from moderators Martha Raddatz and Anderson Cooper. But despite his plunge, Trump has plenty of ammunition. One target: Her internal campaign emails, published online by WikiLeaks on Friday, revealed that she had told Wall Street executives that politicians hold two sets of positions, one public and one private, as she advocated open borders and free trade deals.

“The stakes are as high as they can get because voting has already started, and he’s stalled in his momentum and the race is on the line,” said Mari Will, a, veteran GOP debate coach who advised Scott Walker during primaries and served as communications director for the wiliest Republican debater of them all, Ronald Reagan.

“My advice would be to attack, attack, attack all the way through,” she added, more to shore up support from his core supporters than to reach out for new ones.

It might be too late.

Even before the exodus of senators like John Thune, Kelly Ayotte and John McCain, GOP officials were sweating the possibility that Trump’s recent weakness would once again raise the possibility of a wipeout in Senate races. The RNC, according to three sources, has recently approved a substantial transfer of funds to the National Republican Senate Committee. Spokespersons for both committees declined to discuss the transaction.

And there are growing signs that the GOP nominee is no longer competing just against Hillary Clinton, but against members of his own party who are withdrawing or reconsidering their reluctant endorsements, making Trump’s objective on Sunday less about reviving his candidacy than proving himself able to stop his party from completely abandoning him to the electoral wolves howling outside Trump Tower.

“I am going to watch his level of contrition over the next few days,” tweeted Sen. Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican locked in a neck-and-neck reelection battle, “to determine my level of support.”