Salem's Shadow Lengthens
Last month, I heard the phrase “witch hunt” invoked three times on national news. None of the circumstances bore even a passing resemblance to a witch hunt.
At first, I dismissed it as one of our most persistent civic reflexes: paranoia cloaked in legality. Of course the execution of nineteen innocent people—condemned on spectral evidence—has become the ultimate presidential defense. A rhetorical talisman summoned whenever scrutiny threatens the powerful.
But the more I considered it, the more surreal the linguistic odyssey of “witch hunt” seemed. It was born on the gallows of 1692, mid-hysteria and state-sanctioned murder. It then traveled across centuries of presidential politics to land, of all places, on Trump’s Twitter feed—wielded like a shield against investigation, indictment, and consequence.
We forget too easily that the original witch trials disproportionately targeted the poor, the outspoken, the othered—especially women. They were fueled by fear, patriarchy, and a legal system bent to the will of the righteous. Today, when powerful men co-opt the term to resist accountability, they invert its meaning. What once signified persecution by power now serves as rhetorical refuge for it.
I’ve begun excavating the metaphor’s peculiar archaeology through presidential history—a record of how language compresses trauma into shorthand, then reemerges, distorted, in the mouths of those least entitled to it. I’ve barely scratched the surface—Trump’s 2017 usage alone was an avalanche.
Founding Fathers: Persecution Without the Metaphor
The men who shaped the republic stood close enough to Salem’s ruins to avoid its vocabulary.
George Washington, whose letters teem with political anxieties, preferred more precise invective—“malicious” being a favorite.
John Adams, writing to Jefferson in 1813, offered this striking parallel: “The spirit of persecution manifest in the House of Representatives appears to me much parallel with the trial of witches by swimming.” The metaphor was embryonic—recognizable, but not yet born.
Thomas Jefferson flirted with “witch-finding” in private letters on religious persecution but shunned it in political contexts. He favored “persecution,” “calumny,” “conspiracy.” Words with bite, but no broomsticks.