"Enemies are useful: We all know the sweet, full-bodied relief of having someone else to blame for our problems.Everyone does this, but Donald Trump does it with a special wronged fury. “Witch hunt” for him is an unshakable belief in his own persecution leading him to compare his own experiences to vastly worse ones. He welcomes opportunities to divert attention from the allegations; since January he has denounced one “witch hunt” or another on Twitter. But an obsession with the witch hunt long precedes him in American politics: In the last century, a parade of disgraced presidents and other public figures (almost all of them men) have also chosen to don this particular black mantle of victimhood. “Witch hunt” once meant persecution of the marginalized by the powerful. So how" did it come to suggest something so nearly the opposite?
At www.nytimes.com
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