With the Halloween season approaching, it’s a timely opportunity to clear up some misstatements that President Trump and his apologists keep repeating. Namely, that the various investigations surrounding the Trump White House are “witch hunts.”

The foremost fact to remember is that in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692, there were no witches. Salem in 1692 was a mean, hard, place full of mean, hard people but contained absolutely no witches.

No one alive can recall the world before electric lights, so it is hard to imagine just how bottomless the nighttime darkness was in those days. For Salem residents, the world beyond their candles and hearths was full of nameless terrors. Superstition provided an answer for those questions. The people who perished were not witches. They were innocents, caught up in a hysteria born of ignorance and fear.

Here in 2018 we have at least five guilty pleas so far associated with close Trump associates, including his former national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and his former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who recently pleaded guilty to the aptly named “Conspiracy Against The United States.”

Both Manafort and Flynn were heavily involved in dealings with agents of Russian autocrat-gangster Vladimir Putin. Putin, beyond the strongman posturing, is strongly suspected in the murders and attempted murders of numerous political opponents and dissidents – the most recent example being Sergei and Yulia Skripal, the father and daughter poisoned in England by a powerful chemical weapon that only a state-sponsored assailant would likely have access to.

What we have here isn’t a “witch hunt,” it’s a “witch find.” More guilty pleas and convictions will no doubt follow. To compare the criminality and sleaze of the current presidency to the murder of innocents 300 years ago is doing a disservice to those killed way back then.

Jeremy Smith

Old Orchard Beach

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