It's been roughly 40 days since Donald Trump became the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party, and the mere fact of it hasn't come to feel any less weird, or any less scary. It also means that the three people I had coffee and pastries with last Wednesday morning—Danny Diaz (Jeb Bush's campaign manager), Jeff Roe (Ted Cruz's campaign manager) and Alex Conant (Marco Rubio's communications director)—have been able to process what the hell happened.

Well-compensated, highly intelligent and very publicly defeated, each one of them is still angry, both at Trump and at the media. Each one of them has theories about how we got to this very disconcerting place in American political history. And not one of them is prepared to vote for Trump.

The stories they told me over a 90-minute conversation at a bar called Black Jack in Washington DC provided an entirely different view of the campaign and of elite Republican thinking. They spoke with unusual candor about which strategies they pushed that they now regret, how they believe network executives conspired against their candidates, what a disaster the Republican convention will be and why a Hillary Clinton blowout may be upon us. This is what it’s like to lose to Donald Trump.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.