How We Know Trump Is Losing and Why He Wants To

First reason we know Trump is losing:
His campaign has admitted he's losing. A Bloomsberg News reporter was allowed inside Trump's campaign to talk to the polling people working for him. (Trump's actually doing a lot more polling than he lets on.) And his own polling people admit their figures match those of Nate Silver's "538" site: “Nate Silver’s results have been similar to ours,” says Trump's lead pollster. Inside the Trump Bunker, With 12 Days to Go - msn.com.  Silver gives Trump only an 18% chance of winning. Not impossible odds, certainly, but nearly so. 2016 Election ForecastUpdated 1 hour ago

Second reason we know Trump is losing:
Pew Research, the gold standard of pollsters, announced today that Trump is 6 points behind Clinton nationally. Six points is beyond the margin of error and tends to confirm all the polls saying Clinton leads by 3 or 4 points, amounts normally considered within the margin of error.

Third reason we know Trump is losing:
There doesn't seem to be a possible way he can get to 270 electoral college votes. Even if he won all the states still considered "toss ups" (a dubious "if"), he still comes up with only 266. New Hampshire has exactly the 4 votes he needs, but it has moved well away from being a toss-up, with Clinton leading there now by 9 points.The other "swing states" that have already swung to Clinton look equally unobtainable by Trump.

Fourth reason we know Trump is losing:
Clinton's lead nationally and in the key states is confirmed by a separate metric. Better to say, Trump's failing is confirmed. When one compares how the GOP Senate candidates are doing in the states Trump must have, they are out-polling him by numbers that fit with the numbers showing him trailing Clinton. Thus—by two separate measurements—Trump is losing.

Fifth reason we know Trump is losing:
He hasn't put his money where his mouth is. He boasted he would finance his own campaign, but he's put in only a fraction of what would be needed to run an actual presidential campaign. (In 2012 that was a billion per candidate in th general election.)  In the critical weeks of fall, no other big shots have ponied up either.  Money Flows Down Ballot as Donald Trump Is Abandoned by Big Donors (Even Himself)    The so-called smart money says "no thanks". The little folks, however, have sent in their hard-earned cash in small donations and Trump has gleefully lined his pockets with a lot of it. How Donald Trump is making money off his presidential bid

Sixth reason we know Trump is losing:
He never cared about winning. He was in it for the adulation and the money. Especially the money. He's made lots of money off the campaign, just as he promised to do back in 2000 when he told Fortune magazine, “It’s very possible that I could be the first presidential candidate to run and make money on it.” In September, CBS repeated this quote and went on to tell the ways Trump is skimming a lot of money from his campaign to put into his own pockets. How Donald Trump is making money off his presidential bid.

The bottom line for Trump is the traditional bottom line!
For Trump the bottom line is always the money. In order for his scams to work he has to look like he's losing. That's how he walked away with lots of money from his casino bankruptcies. And it's why he has to look like a "loser" now. He's worked very hard at losing, because for him to "win", i.e. for him that means winning the money, he has to look like a loser.        

More on that next time when Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel help us understand Trump's con.