Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, America's most unflappable flack, acknowledged the obvious at the start of her segment on Meet the Press over the weekend.

"We are behind" were the first words she uttered.

As many are pointing out, she might want to tell her boss that.

He continues to live in an alternate reality. He says, "We're winning this race." He says the latest polls are "phony polls" put out by the "phony media" that are of a piece with a "crooked" and "rigged" system and "what they try to do is to suppress the vote, this way people don't go out and vote, but we're winning this race, I really believe we're winning."

So which is it? Are they behind or are they winning?

Are Trump and Conway even speaking to each other? "It’s almost as if Donald Trump’s campaign manager isn’t even talking to her candidate these days," a blogger at the Washington Post writes, adding:

I’m at a loss. What practical purpose is served by having you and your campaign manager publicly disagree about whether you are actually behind in the race — something that inevitably leads to stories like this one about how maybe your campaign is off the rails and has no direction.

If Trump and Conway are in touch, it seems like the least he could do is teach her to use Twitter—she still hasn't mastered what the period in front of the @ is for.

On the one hand, I feel bad for her for having to be associated with such a delusional lunatic. On the other, I admire her for protecting herself. She doesn't want to go down as a delusional lunatic, too—after all, there's a 2020 Mike Pence race on the horizon.

But then I remember Hillary Clinton's sick burn last week and feel bad for her again.

Ryan Lizza recently reported that Conway and Trump have been having this conversation about whether he's going to win for a while—since the day she was hired, in August.

“We’re losing,” she told him.

“No—look at the polls,” Trump replied.

“I looked at the polls. We’re losing,” she said. “But we don’t have to lose. There’s still a pathway back.”

Huh—interesting that he trusted the polls back then.

Anyway, Lizza's New Yorker profile of Conway ends like this:

At the end of our interview at Trump Tower, Conway told me that she will turn fifty on January 20th, Inauguration Day. Before she started working for Trump, she promised her family a trip to Italy to celebrate her birthday. Now she hopes to be in the capital, but, like Trump, she has a backup plan. “I’ll either be at a fabulous party in Washington, D.C., or I’ll be in Italy,” she said, with a smile and a wink. “I can’t lose.”

Just today, the New York Times published a piece of analysis of Trump's personality based on a cache of primary source material—audio and transcripts of interviews conducted by Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio in 2014.

The intense ambitions and undisciplined behaviors of Mr. Trump have confounded even those close to him, especially as his presidential campaign comes to a tumultuous end, and he confronts the possibility of the most stinging defeat of his life. But in the more than five hours of conversations — the last extensive biographical interviews Mr. Trump granted before running for president — a powerful driving force emerges: his deep-seated fear of public embarrassment.

The recordings reveal a man who is fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status and contemptuous of those who fall from grace.

That explains his insistence that he's not losing. If he does appear to be losing, it's the system's fault. It also underscores what a nightmare he is going to be on November 9.