Mark Epstein, reviewing a book for NRO, repeats a mistake that hits close to home. In passing he refers to a conference of the American Enterprise Institute. I’m a fellow there and attended the conference. Relying on an article in Fortune, Epstein writes that “this meeting’s purpose was to prevent Donald Trump from winning the GOP nomination.” The Fortune article is a rewrite of one in Huffington Post. But the picture has gotten a little blurrier with every copy.

The Huffington Post article actually contradicts Epstein’s description: “The meeting was not planned to be a strategy session on how to stop the GOP front-runner, but rather evolved into one.” But the article doesn’t even back up the “evolved into one” claim. It mentions two specific topics of presentations: one on the 1896 election, and one on encryption. Huffington Post got the agenda for the meeting, an agenda in which the words “Trump,” “Republican,” and “primaries” do not appear. And it also reports, “Sources familiar with the meeting — who requested anonymity because the forum is off the record — said that much of the conversation around Trump centered on ‘how this happened, rather than how are we going to stop him,’ as one person put it.”

In other words: The conference—which, by the way, is held every year on the same weekend—was not planned as a way to stop Trump. The timing of the 2016 conference, in the middle of an exciting and unusual primary season, ensured that a lot of people were talking about what was going on. My sense of the weekend was that a lot of the people there did not consider Trump anywhere close to their first choice, and also that most of those people thought he was the likely nominee and preferred him to Hillary Clinton.

I’ve been at AEI for almost five years and have been paying attention to the work done there for longer. Its general ethos is to pay more attention to the climate than the weather, and it’s in the business of—if you’ll forgive the expression—climate change. That was true of the March 2016 conference, as it has been of the conference in the other years I’ve attended it.