Ding-dong, the witch is dead! Which old witch? The wicked witch
Ding-dong, the wicked witch is dead
Wake up, you sleepy head, rub your eyes, get out of bed
Wake up, the wicked witch is dead!
She’s gone where the goblins go below, below, below, yo ho
Let’s open up and sing, and ring the bells out
Ding-dong! The merry-o, sing it high, sing it low
Let them know the wicked witch is dead

— E Harburg and Harold Arlen, The Wizard of Oz 

Double, double toil and trouble; fire burn and cauldron bubble.

— William Shakespeare, Macbeth 

An article in the May 2023 issue of the authoritative periodical Scientific American noted, “Every year more than 1,000 people around the world, including men and children, are tortured, expelled from their homes or killed after being charged with witchcraft — using magic, usually to cause harm. Far from declining with modernisation, as some 20th-century scholars predicted, witch hunts are holding steady in some places and may be happening more often in others.” 

This points to an important fact that even if witchcraft itself is not something real (presumably), witch-hunts — sometimes fatal ones — are indeed a very real, dangerous thing in our present world. Presumably, this chasing after so-called witches hasn’t really been an American thing since the infamous Salem witch trials back in the 17th century, although the phrase itself has entered the popular parlance since the political circumstances of the mid-20th century, and as a term, it has now been appropriated by no less than Donald Trump to explain his persecution and exonerate his words and deeds.

The Scientific American article added, “Multiple roots entwine to produce a witch hunt. A belief in sorcery, a patriarchal society, sudden and mysterious deaths resulting from a paucity of health care, inaccessible justice systems that give impunity to attackers, a triggering disaster — all of these contribute. But as one of us (Federici) has argued in her 2004 book Caliban and the Witch and subsequent publications, what sustained periods of witch-hunting have in common, across time, space and culture, is a backdrop of social and economic dislocation.

“Witch hunts can erupt suddenly, as during the COVID-19 pandemic, when terrified people searched for scapegoats. But when rates of these assaults have stayed high over decades — such as in Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries and in parts of Asia and Africa in the past 50 years — subsistence economies were in the process of being replaced by monetary and capitalistic systems.”

The Massachusetts Bay Colony of the 17th century, the site of those infamous Salem witch trials, was, of course, just such a society under stress. It was assimilating waves of new immigrants (including religious dissenters uncomfortable with the original theocratic establishment of the colony’s Puritan founders) even as it increasingly engaged in bloody fighting with the indigenes already there.

Meanwhile, those new settlements were quickly moving beyond subsistence farming, herding and fishing, as they started to become integrated into a rapidly evolving English transatlantic trading system that included New England agricultural and forest products, English manufactures, and African and West Indian slaves and indentured servants and tropical products.

Trump troubles

Of course, this kind of severe social dislocation and the consequent hunting for scapegoats is something rather different from the kind of pressures and stresses Trump keeps screaming about, harping on and repeating ad nauseam to his cult gatherings. He is not complaining about the iniquity of his undergoing a trial by dunking or the sniffing out of a witch, and the stoning of the person found guilty of casting spells and hexes or turning amphibians into potent magical unguents. 

Rather, he is complaining that “they” have been tormenting him and poking deep into his life and works to lay bare for all to see the alleged, duplicitous political behaviour he was engaged in as president. Such charges have come through numerous media exposés, the two congressional impeachments while he was still president, and now, indictments handed down in four separate investigations by prosecutors in New York City, Washington, DC, Florida and Atlanta.

The accumulating charges against the former president began with the first impeachment proceedings over his efforts to pressure the Ukrainian government to find — or manufacture — dirt on the man who would succeed him as president, Joe Biden, back when he was vice-president, in exchange for weaponry to equip its army to ward off Russian attacks. 

The second impeachment charged him with inciting the insurrection of 6 January to overturn the actual results of the 2020 election. While both bills of impeachment were passed by the House of Representatives, the Senate failed to convict him in both cases, despite the evidence.

Subsequently, as Trump became a private citizen (with a metastasising grudge against anyone who might challenge his preeminence in the Republican Party), he was indicted in New York City for the 2016 flouting of campaign financing laws by using campaign funds to pay off an adult film actress for her to remain shtum about their brief affair, worrying that revelations of these deeds might adversely affect his nascent campaign for the presidency.

Thereafter, two federal indictments followed. The first is for violations of the handling of highly classified documents by storing them at his private club in Florida and refusing to return them to the National Archives and Records Administration, and then trying to sabotage the video recordings of attempts to move the documents in question to boltholes out of the reach of the FBI, despite court orders for him to surrender them.

The second federal indictment has a series of charges that by word and deed he incited a violent mob to attempt to seize the Capitol Building and prevent the lawful confirmation of the newly elected president on 6 January 2021. During the course of this insurrection there were a number of deaths among police and rioters.

The most recent indictment has come from Georgia, where Trump and 18 associates attempted to force that state’s government to falsely change the outcome of the election, giving Trump a stronger case that there had been a major, fraudulent effort to elect Biden as president, despite there being no evidence of illegal voting. Lest we forget, there are also a number of pending investigations and possible fraud charges over income tax violations now being pursued in New York.

The astonishing feature of the contemporary US political landscape is that as each indictment has been announced, there have apparently been upticks among Republican voters in support of Trump, at least in the early stages of the preliminaries of campaigning — before the actual primaries and caucuses begin in earnest in January 2024. That said, polling at this point also shows that a minority of voters nationally (Democrats, Republicans, and independents) prefer the former president in the 2024 election. 

The reasons for Trump’s continuing hold on a significant share of the electorate have been extensively explored and debated by academics, political operatives and media commentators. The key factors seem to be a growing sense of unease among many working-class, rural and small-town, and less academically qualified voters, in tandem with those fearful about the implications of the country’s changing demographics, the pressures of globalisation and job shifts to Asia or lost to automation.

Such fears, translating into support for Trump, are further buttressed by hot-button issues such as immigration from Latin America, the supposed “wokeness” of the bicoastal, elite institutions and a sharp division nationally over abortion and similar individual rights concerns. (It is important to remember, however, that abortion rights continue to have a substantial majority of support by Americans, despite the recent Supreme Court decision gutting that right.)

It remains an issue — and a puzzle — just how a man born with a solid gold spoon in his mouth and a big trust fund from dad, a man with a history of business transgressions against contractors and subcontractors, and a man whose business track record is a long roster of purveying dubious projects that effectively swindled customers, has managed to position himself as being the vengeful weapon of retribution for the “underclass” against “the swells” and “woke”. (Perhaps, besides being a superb salesman of dreams and greed, he really is a witch — or a wizard — after all. If so, the witch-hunts he claims to be the victim of would be appropriate.)

As Trump’s legal troubles mount, however, some of the academic, political and media discussion has begun to focus on whether there can still be a Trumpist movement in the hands of another politician, if the former president becomes mired too deeply in his legal troubles. Accordingly, the question becomes whether the issues he has embraced represent a deeper hold on a significant share of the electorate or if they are a more transient populist moment.

Echoes of McCarthy

For some researchers, what Trump has been channelling and attempting to draw upon in the fears of a significant minority echo what was ubiquitous in the late 1940s and early 1950s in US political discourse.

Then, the fear of communist subversion and treachery had been fuelled by the collapse of the increasingly inept, corrupt Nationalist Chinese government and its subsequent flight to Taiwan after being defeated in battle by the Communist Party’s army (and thus the angry cry: who lost China?); by North Korea’s invasion of the South in 1950; by the postwar consolidation of Soviet power across the span of Eastern Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Balkans; and then the astonishing tests of the USSR’s atomic weapons in 1949. In essence, in that view, the failures of US foreign policy must have had a sinister origin, from deep inside the country’s elite structures.

Many Republicans in Congress and elsewhere, led by a charismatic but vicious psychopath, Senator Joe McCarthy, insisted a secret conspiracy of communist agents and fellow travellers (together with the usual “useful idiots”) had consciously planned all of this and then made sure it had happened. Their plan was to steal the fruits of victory in World War 2 from the US and open the country up to subversion and conquest by a diabolical enemy. 

As historian Richard Hofstadter described it in his classic article The Paranoid Style in American Politics, McCarthy, at the height of his influence, argued in 1951, “How can we account for our present situation unless we believe that men high in this government are concerting to deliver us to disaster? This must be the product of a great conspiracy on a scale so immense as to dwarf any previous such venture in the history of man. A conspiracy of infamy so black that, when it is finally exposed, its principals shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all honest men… What can be made of this unbroken series of decisions and acts contributing to the strategy of defeat? They cannot be attributed to incompetence… The laws of probability would dictate that part of … [the] decisions would serve the country’s interest.”

The purveyors of this US version of “the stab in the back” held public hearings in Congress over communist influence in the government, the military, academia, and the entertainment and film industries, taunting those called to testify about their potential treason and then demanding those who really were leftists to point out yet others.

Those who refused to testify about their connections were publicly vilified or blacklisted and found themselves hounded out of jobs or unable to work at all. Atom bomb “father” Robert Oppenheimer was one of those so hounded. (The growing national hysteria was abetted by the fact there actually were Soviet spies in the secret atomic weapons project. That allowed the Soviets to move more quickly in their nuclear ambitions than might otherwise have been possible had they been forced to rely only on their own research and development.)

Eventually, McCarthy was done in by his increasingly wild charges about Russian infiltration into the military that were disproved in yet another public hearing, this time as a televised extravaganza. His hold on power broken, the senator died soon afterwards.

These proceedings soon became known as witch-hunts, with the idea that such proceedings echoed the way the actual hounding of imaginary witches had taken place in Salem, Massachusetts and parts of Europe so many years earlier. In response to these ongoing calumnies, playwright Arthur Miller, a close friend of many in the arts who had been cruelly embarrassed or much worse by these charges, wrote one of his best plays, The Crucible. Ostensibly about those long-ago events in Salem, it was easily seen (and, of course, meant to be seen) as a compelling metaphor for the hysteria of the witch-hunts taking place throughout US society.

At least in the US, the term “witch-hunt” has now become a convenient and well-understood term for hapless individuals — and with very little to do with imaginary witches and wizards — tormented by a society in the grip of a national hysteria and eager to find a scapegoat for the real or imagined ills and troubles afflicting that society. In that sense, Trump, a once and potentially future powerful individual, instead of being a solitary leftist actor or screenwriter under the gun, has appropriated the term to argue he is being tormented by false charges being foisted upon a nation by all the evil forces arrayed against him (and his supporters) — the deep state, the leftist media, a fatally woke academia and actual communist sympathisers, or worse.

This is quite a trick to have carried off — that transposition of who is the hunter and who is the hunted, given the way Trump carried out his presidency and how he is building his campaign to be reelected out of a harsh sense of grievance from all those indictments. As the actual trials eventually get under way, we will become captive victims watching the sleight of hand at the centre of this inversion — probably for years to come. We have to hope someone is preparing a really engrossing drama like The Crucible about this. DM