After relentlessly stabbing away at Donald Trump with character assaults and ridicule, the New York Times believed it had finally found his Achilles’ heel.

It came the old-fashioned way.

It showed up in a snail-mail envelope from an anonymous source that claimed to be Trump’s income-tax documents from 1995, showing he’s quite likely paid no income taxes for 18 years after writing off a near-billion-dollar business loss.

The result? Luke-warm heat, but no boiling oil.

Clinton herself, as it turns out, used the same loophole in 2015 to avoid almost $700,000 in taxes.

Not a billion, obviously, but still 14 times the average annual household income in the United States.

Despite it all, however, Trump is still packing them in at his rallies while Hillary Clinton is either talking to empty seats or cancelling venues when no-shows looked unavoidable.

It’s a conundrum for the anxious left.

The most recent presidential tracker poll by UPI, in fact, shows Clinton slipping almost 2% to Trump.

In the working-class town Pueblo, Co., for example, police had to shut the streets on Monday to accommodate Trump’s entourage, the seats to his rally having been sold out for days in what is now being seen as a faltering Democratic stronghold.

Joining the Rust Belt as yet another shuttered steel town, and having an unemployment rate almost twice the state average will do that.

Contrast Trump’s welcome to a supposedly unfriendly demographic in Colorado to that of Clinton’s Sunday morning appearance at a black church in Charlotte, N.C., where the pews were largely unoccupied.

If you went by coverage in the mainstream media, however, you’d think the church was jam-packed. Then again, no one in the mainstream media published a picture taken from the back of the church where the emptiness was obvious.

Folks stayed away as if it wasn’t even a Sunday.

There will be those who will argue that Trump only packs them in to the point of turning hundreds away because of the circus atmosphere surrounding his campaign, and that no one within driving distance wants to miss out on the next outrageous outburst to come out of his mouth.

There is some truth to this, of course, but, that said, his rallies have most recently been free of hecklers.

Maybe it’s because of fears that Trump’s goons will dive into the audience and pound the bejeebers out of them, or maybe it’s because his message about job creation, a corrupt Washington, and a “crooked Hillary” is resonating.

Since John F. Kennedy was elected in 1960, only one Republican presidential candidate has ever won over the electorate in Pueblo, and that was in 1972 when Richard Nixon was victorious over George McGovern.

Nixon won his landslide by courting blue-collar workers with his Hard Hats for Nixon campaign.

He called these voters his “silent majority.”

Last year, Donald Trump bragged on Twitter that he had already locked up the same blue-collar crowd.

“Finally, the silent majority is back,” he tweeted.

It is now 34 days before time will tell.

markbonokoskl@gmail.com