Witch Hunting!

 Donald J. Trump keeps using the phrase witch hunt for the criminal trials he faces. He tosses the word around like Pavlov ringing bells for his dogs. No one calls him on his use. His incorrect use amounts to a lie.

For clues on a real witch hunt, take a look at Dissent's Sins of Omission.

John Proctor Jr., a Puritan settler of Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, was convicted of witchcraft in a Salem court on August 5, 1692, and hanged two weeks later. He was one of twenty men and women executed in the Salem witchcraft trials.

Roughly two and a half centuries later, a character named for and loosely based on Proctor appeared as the protagonist of Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible, which opened on Broadway on January 22, 1953. As New York Times drama critic Brooks Atkinson noted in a dry understatement in his review of the play, “Neither Mr. Miller nor his audiences are unaware of certain similarities between the perversions of justice then and today.”

Where there are documents, not the hysterical ravings of young women, it is not a witch hunt. Where there is a due process - cross-examination of the state's witnesses, the choice of one's own lawyers, the right to call your own witnesses, appeals of a conviction - there is no witch hunt. 

A person calls a legitimate prosecution a witch hunt when they know they are guilty.

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