The Future President, Donald Trump

True, but the thing is, the guy burst onto the scene by buying a pro football team in a league that soon folded, and he always played up his wealth. Then he turns around and tries to tell people he started out poor? What chutzpah.

Like a boxer on the ropes, the Trump campaign has weathered a flurry of body blows over the past few weeks. Is this the beginning of the end, a full three months before election day? Should Donald Trump throw in the towel before the inevitable November knockout?

The latest round of national polls has set off something akin to a mass panic among Republican officeholders and intelligentsia, with some wishing Mr Trump would just quit already and leave them to pick up the pieces.

Here's why.

Hillary Clinton is up seven percentage points in a CBS survey, nine in CNN and NBC, an eye-popping 15 in a Marist survey that had the race within the margin of error just a few weeks ago. She's posting sizeable leads in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, New Hampshire and Florida. She's even leading in Georgia, a state Republican Mitt Romney carried by 8 percentage points.

August polls are notoriously fickle, of course, and a Clinton bump was always expected - a typical result following a successful national party convention.

This surge, however, has the feeling of something more substantive, given that it comes on the heels of a series of Mr Trump's unforced errors.

The Republican standard-bearer suggested Russia should hack Mrs Clinton's emails. He fought with the parents of a slain Muslim-American soldier in Iraq and feuded with Republican congressional leaders, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

These were just the headliners, too, nestled among a series of lesser gaffes. Mr Trump reportedly questioned why the US doesn't consider a first-use nuclear policy, insisted that Russia would never invade Ukraine, suggested women who are sexually harassed at work should find other employment, made jokes about a crying baby at the mother's expense and rehashed a series of old political feuds, such as his off-colour remarks about Fox News host Megyn Kelly.

Do you have a quote or story of Trump somewhere or sometime saying he was brought up poor?

As Donald Trump tells it, he has been told no his entire life. For example, he said Monday, his father gave him a "small loan of a million dollars" that he had to repay with interest at the start of his career.

“Oh many times. I’ve been told no by him. My whole life, really has been a no," the Republican presidential candidate said during a town hall event in Atkinson, New Hampshire, on NBC's "Today."

“It has not been easy for me. It has not been easy for me. I started off in Brooklyn. My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars," Trump remarked. "I came into Manhattan, and I had to pay him back, and I had to pay him back with interest. But I came into Manhattan and I started buying properties, and I did great."

Trump said his father had told him that going to Manhattan would not work, and later in his life, other people told him that a presidential campaign would not pan out.

NBC's Matt Lauer followed up on Trump's "small loan" remark: "By the way, let's just put this in perspective, you said it hasn't been easy for you, but my dad gave me a million-dollar loan. That probably is going to seem pretty easy to a lot of people."

"You're right, but a million dollars isn't very much compared to what I've built," Trump countered. "I mean, I've built one of the great companies, but it's always been, you know, you can't do this, you can't do that."