It was a fitting coincidence. On the overcast June morning when Politico Magazine convened five Republican insiders at the Capitol Hill Club in Washington, D.C., for a conversation about the fate of their party, Donald Trump's top advisers were next door at the Republican National Committee headquarters. They were trying, not entirely successfully, to mend a strained relationship between the party leadership and a celebrity candidate turned presumptive presidential nominee who was uninterested in heeding the RNC's advice. Washington Republicans not already turned off by Trump's flexible policy positions and inflammatory rhetoric could not keep their candidate under control.

If one thing has become clear from Trump's primary romp, it's that the Republican Party as an institution is broken. So can it be fixed? Should it be? To answer those questions and more, we brought together two groups of Republicans for two separate conversations, both moderated by Politico Editor Susan B. Glasser and chief political correspondent Glenn Thrush. The inside-the-Beltway types who met at the Capitol Hill Club—a year to the day after Trump announced his candidacy—were a pretty despondent group; their major debate was not over whether Trump's candidacy had damaged their party but by how much. (Their discussion is published below.) The second group we convened consisted of four Trump campaign surrogates around the country, all of whom see their candidate as the result of, and antidote to, a GOP establishment that has lost touch with the people it ostensibly represents. (You can read this conversation on page 2.) Nearly everyone in both groups did agree on one thing, however. The state of the Republican Party, they said, is weak.