Donald Trump is on track to lose in November and to refuse to accept the legitimacy of that Election Day result. That’s a problem not just for Hillary Clinton but for both political parties and the country. For everyone, really, other than Donald Trump.

By hiring Breitbart’s Steve Bannon, a media provocateur in his own image, and accepting the resignation of the man who was supposed to professionalize him, Trump is signaling the final 78 days of his presidential campaign will be guided by a staff that indulges his deeply held conspiracy theories and validates his hermetically sealed worldview.

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That includes his insistence that the only way he loses is in a “rigged” election. According to two long-time Trump associates, the notion of a fixed election isn’t just viewed as smart politics inside Trump Tower; it’s something the GOP nominee believes.

“If he loses, [he’ll say] ‘It’s a rigged election.’ If he wins, he’ll say it was rigged and he beat it. And that’s where this is headed no matter what the outcome is,” said one Trump ally. “If Donald Trump loses, he is going to point the finger at the media and the GOP establishment. I can’t really picture him giving a concession speech, whatever the final margin.”

“It’s the same as how he looks at the polls,” said another close Trump confidant. “Any poll that shows him ahead he likes. Any poll that shows him behind, he thinks it’s rigged.”

Trump began to suggest that the election would “fixed” last month as Hillary Clinton opened a lead following July’s party conventions. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on,” Trump said at a rally in Altoona. Days earlier in Wilmington, North Carolina, he’d warned that without stronger voter identification laws people would be “voting 15 times for Hillary.” The first image of a Trump campaign ad, released on Friday, is that of a polling place as a narrator alleges “the system” is “rigged”; and his campaign has already begun recruiting volunteers to monitor polling places, specifically in urban precincts where African-American voters, very few of which support Trump, predominate.

Trump’s words are having an effect. Just 38 percent of Trump supporters believe their votes will be counted accurately; and only 49 percent of all registered voters are “very confident” their votes will be tabulated without error, according to a Pew Research survey last week.

The implications—short- and long-term—are serious. Interviews with more than a dozen senior GOP operatives suggest growing panic that Trump’s descent down this alt-right rabbit hole and, beyond that, his efforts to de-legitimize the very institutions that undergird American democracy—the media and the electoral process itself—threaten not just their congressional majorities or the party’s survival but, potentially, the stability of the country’s political system.

“We’ve never had a presidential candidate who has questioned the legitimacy of an electoral outcome nationally,” said Dan Senor, who was a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “This does take us to a whole new world if the actual presidential candidate is questioning the legitimacy of this process, and the damage to our democracy could be substantial.”

In 2008, even as some on the far right questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy as president based on false suggestions he was not born in America, McCain conceded quickly. Most notably, after the Supreme Court’s 2001 Bush v. Gore decision, countless Democrats complained that the result was unjust—but Al Gore and Joe Lieberman did not.

“Among the values most necessary for a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power that’s gone on uninterrupted since 1797. What enables that is the acceptance of the election’s outcome by the losers,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP operative who was John McCain’s campaign strategist in 2008.

“Here you have a candidate after a terrible three weeks, which has all been self-inflicted, saying the only way we lose is if it’s ‘rigged’ or stolen—in a media culture where people increasingly don’t buy into generally accepted facts and turn to places to have their opinions validated where there’s no wall between extreme and mainstream positions. That’s an assault on some of the pillars that undergird our system. People need to understand just how radical a departure this is from the mean of American politics.”

Should Trump opt not to concede after a loss or deliberately roil his supporters and spark uprisings by refusing to accept the legitimacy of the election results, he would still have little recourse to alter a significant electoral victory for Clinton. Only if the election were close, hinging on one or two states where there were alleged voting irregularities, could Trump seriously contest the result in court.

But beyond who wins the White House in November, many Republicans fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and in politics itself will have a lasting impact.

“The damage this is going to do to various institutions is going to be long term,” said Charlie Sykes, a prominent conservative radio host in Milwaukee who has been one of the country’s most outspoken and consistent anti-Trump voices. “How do you restore civil discourse after all of this? He is a post-modern authoritarian who’s in the process of delegitimizing every institution—the media, the ballot box—that can be a check on him.”

Sykes, who is open about his growing discomfort with the increasingly partisan media landscape and reductive, zero-sum political culture he and his more strident cohorts have helped create, views Trump’s talk of “rigged” systems and its subsequent validation and amplification by outlets like Breitbart as “dangerous.”

“There’s a sizable portion of his fan base that will believe these things, and it’s toxic to our democracy,” he continued. “You’re basically taking ideas and voices that have been on the fringes—justifiably—and Donald Trump is bringing them squarely into the mainstream and weaponizing them. This is something we’ve not had to confront before. At one time there were responsible voices that would have drawn some lines that would have kept these voices from dominating our discourse; and they don’t exist now.”

Having resisted and ultimately rejected efforts by Manafort and RNC Chairman Reince Preibus to control and temper his message, Trump is seemingly rededicating himself to the pugilistic populism, the economic nationalism and ethnic tribalism that have so endeared him to the conservative base—and so limited his appeal beyond it.

Kellyanne Conway, the pollster whose hiring as campaign manager was announced the same day as Bannon’s, might have given Republicans exasperated by Trump’s inability to pivot a glimmer of confidence that the nominee was tackling one of his biggest problems, a 30-point deficit to Clinton with college-educated white women—if not for Bannon’s plan to “let Trump be Trump” that’s likely to undercut her efforts.

Trump’s late efforts over the weekend to reach an African-American constituency that’s almost entirely written him off illustrate just how unlikely it may be that Trump’s own words will be consistent enough to persuade the skeptics. At a rally in Michigan, he swung from predicting he’d win 95 percent of black voters in a reelection bid (polls show he’ll be lucky to win 5 percent this year) to patronizing them into supporting him. “You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs,” he said. “Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

Republicans worry about Trump’s coarseness and his forays into racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and unconstitutional religious tests coming to define the party itself, especially for a new generation of Americans.

“If the Republican Party wants to be a governing party again, it has to think about how representative it is of the American people as a whole,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and an adviser to Marco Rubio and other Republicans. “It’s tough to do that when the premise of a campaign seems to be exclusion and separation. I think it’s very hard to get to a place where you have a party that people see as representing all of the diverse interests of the country.”

Chen and others point to one potential silver lining: that thus far in this election cycle Trumpism has only worked for Trump. Paul Nehlen, whose primary challenge of Speaker Paul Ryan was effectively engineered by Bannon and aided by Breitbart’s daily drumbeat of anti-establishment propaganda, drew a measly 15 percent of the vote on primary day. And mainstream conservative donors have successfully taken out a handful of Tea Party incumbents in other primaries, demonstrating that parroting Trump’s language may not work for candidates other than Trump.

But these operatives understand that Trump, even if he is humiliated on Election Day, is unlikely to quietly exit the political stage—his most ardent cheerleaders, unlikely to admit their candidate never had a chance.

“I can’t see the fever swamp, alt-reality media universe on the right learning the lessons of this,” Sykes said. “Can you see Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham saying, ‘OK, sorry, we screwed up’?”

And many worry that the newly consummated Trump-Breitbart partnership will endure, perhaps in another form—and that both men will be eager to exact revenge.

“What I worry about is that they’re looking past November at forming a different party—that they’ve used the GOP as a vehicle to build this following and that then they just go and build something new,” said Katie Packer, Mitt Romney’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 and the leader of an anti-Trump super PAC.

“That’s damaging because some of these people who like Trump should be Republicans. My hope is that if he loses big, anyone who’s not a racist nationalist says ‘Never again’ and the racist nationalists just retreat to their basements where they belong. But my fear is that Bannon and Trump uniting could be about them looking to do something long-term that would ensure this fringe element remains.”