Instead, I hope to make a specific but important point about the language used by the President, the White House, and supporters of this administration. History-both in the United States and abroad-is littered with actual witch hunts, and this is not a witch hunt.

Well…

Let us recall that the term ‘witch hunt’ predates the separation of Church and State: there was a time when moral and immoral were concerns of daily life; and so it was, at base, an effort to identify a person or persons in a tight-knit community, whose behavior far exceeded a moral boundary. The history is clouded by false accusations of breach of moral duty, and there is an implied impossibility to witchcraft preventing a moral reckoning to any boundary crossing, and it is to the falsity of these accusations and the lack of actual witches — no doubt — to which Trump refers.

But, in a very real and thoroughly acute sense, Donald Trump has crossed many a moral boundary and, what is far worse, brought many others with him.

the traditional ‘witch hunt’ was a hackneyed attempt to identify immorality, perhaps even, pitiably, with immoral intent. That it manufactured moral breaches does not mean that actual moral breaches are not occurring.