It was West Hartford for Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) the other night, the West Hartford Town Hall, a couple of thousand people there to talk with him about their state and their country.

This wasn’t one of the "so-called angry crowds" about which the President of the United States tweeted the other day, the kind he says are showing up in some Republican districts because "liberal activists" — more enemies of the American people, you bet — are sending them there, as if the people in the lines and halls are no better than sheep.

"This wasn't something that had been organized in Washington," Murphy is saying now. "It was part of a growing tempest, in Connecticut and California and Alabama and Kansas City.”

Suddenly, less than four months after Democrats lost an election they took for granted, lost it because enough American voters thought they had been left behind and threw in and threw down with Trump, it is voters in town halls like Chris Murphy’s who feel now as if they are the ones who have now been left behind — who have quickly grown tired of being out-shouted by Trump's crowds, and often by Trump himself.

It is clear by now that we didn’t pay enough attention to the passion in Trump's airplane-hangar crowds, dismissed them far too easily. But it would be as big a mistake for the party now in power to convince itself that the people in these town halls, whether talking to smart, tough young Democrats like Murphy or yelling at Republicans, are nothing more than tools of the devil, enemy-of-the-people, liberal elite. As if the only people who are real Americans think the way they do.

"It's time for Democrats to find our authentic voice," Murphy says, at this time when he has become as loud and visible and eloquent as anyone in his party. "Because if there's one thing we've learned about Trump, it's that his supporters know it's really him speaking, that his view of the country is authentically his, with all its warts.

"If Democrats should have learned anything over the past year, it's that we became too overly cautious, too concerned with screening everything we say. But if there's one thing people know about me is that my voice is my voice. If I sound over-the-top sometimes, it's because I'm angry, and not afraid to let it show, especially if that's what’s necessary to cut through in the age of Trump's Twitter account."

Murphy pauses.

"By the way?" he says. "It's not just the Democrats' job to speak up these days about some of (Trump's) discriminatory practices. But it's as if they think they can worry about that later, once they get their domestic agenda done. So they don't take him on, and that's sad, because the influence of this country is withering around the world as we speak. And Republicans will rue the day they helped let it happen.”

You know that Trump says it is Barack Obama who let this country's influence around the world wither. Trump is the one who says he inherited a mess, acts constantly as if he is the only one who can keep America safe, part of a false bogeyman narrative that we've witnessed one terrorist attack after another since Sept. 11, when the opposite is true. Now Murphy of Connecticut takes it all on, goes at the new President on immigration and Muslim bans and all the rest of it, and makes himself somebody to watch in the process.

“Think about what terrorism is," Murphy says. "It's designed to create a fear in the public disproportionate to the actual threat as a way of getting your government to make mistakes. If you're overreacting, you're playing straight into the terrorists' hands. So with this Muslim ban, we're giving them everything they want.”

Of course, it’s not just the Muslim ban. It is all the stories we read and see from across the country these days about ICE agents and raids and deportation — a country where too many people, however they came to America, are suddenly worried about knocks on the door. It is another bogeyman narrative that crime rates are higher with immigrants than natural-born Americans. Yeah. Go with that.

"Rounding up peaceable Americans and separating them from our families is not who we are," Murphy says.

Murphy was born in White Plains and ran for the Connecticut state legislature and won at 25, ran for the State Senate after that and won, ran for Congress and won, finally won his way into the U.S. Senate. He is 43, a young Democrat making noise at a time when too much of the party is run by crypt keepers. And he is not just talking a good game these days. He is doing something too many Democrats forgot how to do. He is listening.

"There is no anxiety or fear or sadness that cannot be cured by political action," Murphy said the other night in West Hartford.

Trump talks all the time about his movement. So is the one in Town Hall America. They think they're the ones who are trying to make America great again, one town hall at a time.