Just before 9:30 p.m. on Sept. 13, the first Twitter post appeared, directing users to an
obscure article about a remark
Donald J. Trump had made last year that 50 percent of the country did not want to work.
Over the next 48 hours, 1,819 people, seemingly furious that the news media had paid more attention to
Hillary Clinton’s assertion that half of Trump supporters fit into a “basket of deplorables,” lashed out at reporters and news outlets.
“Dear Media: If you don’t cover this, you’re covering for him,
#Trump50percent,” wrote one Twitter user.
“
@CNN @CNNPolitics have been in bed with
#Trump for a year! They refuse to report
#TrumpScandals #Trump50percent” wrote another.
By the end of the week, the hashtag #Trump50percent had appeared in Twitter timelines more than 30,000 times.
Other liberal Twitter users, some of them with more than a million followers, linked to the article and spread the same complaint the Clinton campaign had made: that a shameful false equivalence was causing the media to soft-pedal Mr. Trump’s many transgressions and overplay the few it could find on Mrs. Clinton.
At first glance, the Clintonian grass roots seemed to have organically sprouted in anger. But closer inspection yielded traces of Miracle-Gro that led to the sixth floor of a building in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan.
