The phones began ringing and kept on ringing and each caller said the same thing: ‘I want you to hold more ‘Town Hall’ meetings.’

Sensing a groundswell of support for Town Hall Meetings, rolling across their districts, Republican Congressmen accommodated and walked straight into a trap.

A few days later, stories began to appear in the newspapers:

Republican Town Halls get nasty.

Congressman Chaffetz shouted down…

Angry crowd confronts Congressman Amash…

Republican Congressmen get an unexpected jolt…

Newspaper reporters described Republican Congressmen meeting a fearsome new force: Angry crowds springing to life, spontaneously, overnight, at Town Hall Meetings hundreds of miles apart in Utah, Michigan and Tennessee.

But then, a few days after that, an anti-Trump group’s plan, explaining how it had orchestrated the calls and protests, landed on the Internet – and it turned out the press had been fooled too. And the legend about the birth of a fearsome new force and spontaneous protests went up in smoke.