Despite a hellacious full-blown media swarm attack on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump it is looking like he has again defied conventional wisdom and survived. Trump was baited into a trap over what was clearly an orchestrated attempt by Democrats to exploit a Gold Star Muslim family in order to portray him as one who would spit upon the troops. Throw in a despicable, baseless neo-McCarthyite smear campaign to infer that Trump is a Russian operative and top it off with insinuating that he was getting ready to quit the race and it was an all-out bombardment – the most intense yet.

However, in the first troubling sign that Hate Week was so over the top that it may have actually been a detriment to anti-Trump forces, a new poll shows that the embattled billionaire is closing the gap on Hillary.

As reported by Reuters “Trump narrows to less than three points: Reuters/Ipsos poll”:

Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s lead over Republican rival Donald Trump narrowed to less than 3 percentage points, according to a Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll released on Friday, down from nearly eight points on Monday.

About 42 percent of likely voters favored Clinton, to Trump’s 39 percent, according to the July 31-Aug. 4 online poll of 1,154 likely voters. The poll had a credibility interval of plus or minus 3 percentage points, meaning that the results suggest the race is roughly even.

Among registered voters over the same period, Clinton held a lead of five percentage points, down from eight percentage points on Monday, according to the poll.

The reasons behind the shift were unclear.

What should really set off alarm bells deep within the bowels of the Clinton command bunker is that the results are from the very same poll that was just blatantly rigged in order to put Trump at a disadvantage. It was just last week that Reuters announced that it was altering it’s polling methodology, an act of trickery that was called “…as close as I have ever seen to cooking the results” by veteran political consultant Pat Caddell.  The ferocity of the attacks on Trump were such a thinly disguised form of shedding any remaining pretense of objectivity in the attempt to interfere in the election that it just may have backfired.

In a a Los Angeles Times column published this week and entitled “To fight Trump, journalists have dispensed with objectivity”, libertarian anti-war activist Justin Raimondo predicted this:

Any objective observer of the news media’s treatment of Trump can certainly conclude that reporters are taking a side in this election — and they don’t have to be wearing a button that says “I’m with her” for this to be readily apparent. The irony is that the media’s Trump bashing may wind up having the exact opposite of its intended effect.

Polls shows that journalism is one of the least respected professions in the country, and with Trump calling out media organizations for their bias, widespread slanted reporting is bound to reinforce this point — and to backfire. Trump’s campaign is throwing down the gauntlet to the political class. If journalists are seen as the mouthpiece of that class, they may soon find themselves covering Trump’s inauguration.

While the media and the entire establishment will continue to use their positions to act as Hillary’s cheerleaders the Reuters poll doesn’t bode well, especially as Trump continues to bypass the media by taking his message directly to the people who are still packing venues to hear him speak.

As honest Abe Lincoln once so famously put it:  “You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”