If Donald Trump were the dictator of a banana republic trying to hold onto power against the will of his people, this is the moment when his tanks would start rolling on his cities. Or, given his particular demolition fetish, when the nukes would start falling on them.

That’s because he’s heading, with reckless abandon, toward an Electoral College wipeout. His chances of winning the old-fashioned way are so far gone that his campaign and its surrogates have laid out a three-option plan for defeating Hillary Clinton: imprison her without trial, execute her for treason (again without trial), or delegitimize our hard-earned democratic election system.

It’s easy to think that the race is close because Clinton is leading Trump by “only” 6.2 percentage points in a RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys that include Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Party nominee Jill Stein.

But the average popular-vote margin of victory in the last 10 presidential elections is 6.6 percentage points. In the same period, the winners of presidential elections have averaged 374 electoral votes — 104 more than necessary to be sworn in as president and about 70 percent of those available. With the exception of the unusually close 2000 election, the Electoral College system has skewed in a way that exaggerates popular-vote margins.

For example, when George H.W. Bush destroyed Michael Dukakis, 426-111, in the Electoral College in 1988, he won by less than 8 percentage points in the popular vote. Only twice since then — Bill Clinton in 1996 and Barack Obama in 2008 — has the winner had a wider popular-vote margin than what Clinton currently has in the average of national polls.