US President Donald Trump and the COVID-19 pandemic dominated the news headlines in 2020. Three terms in particular came to symbolize the year: “witch hunt,” “black swan,” and “exponential.”
Trump has tweeted the phrase “witch hunt” approximately once every three days on average during his presidency, and not only in connection with his impeachment trial. He continued to use it later in the year to describe accusations that he mismanaged America’s COVID-19 response, inquiries into his tax returns, an investigation into alleged criminal conduct at the Trump Organization, and other controversies.
Most people made their minds up long ago about whether Trump was guilty of his alleged transgressions. But neither his supporters nor his critics have given full thought to the linguistic implications of the term “witch hunt.” Perhaps it doesn’t mean what they think it does.
The original witch hunts began in early modern Europe and spread to colonial America, in the religious persecution of those accused of practicing witchcraft. In Europe, an estimated 40,000-60,000 people – mainly women – were executed between 1400 and 1782. Americans usually think of the 1692-93 witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts, in which 30 people were convicted and 19 hanged.
The term entered widespread use only in the mid-twentieth century, to describe the frenzied search for communists “under the bed.” Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem trials, The Crucible, was an allegory for US Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings into alleged communist infiltration of the US government.
To be sure, the seventeenth-century witch trials and McCarthyism differed in important ways. For one thing, communists really existed. But the two historical episodes had one thing in common that distinguishes them from the accusations against Trump. In a genuine witch hunt, the hunters start from the firm belief that a particular type of evil-doer – witches or communists – is hiding in plain sight, and then try to identify who they are.
When the president and his many supporters accuse his detractors of carrying out a witch hunt, they are making a different claim. They are claiming that Trump’s critics start from the unwavering belief that he is up to no good, and see it as their job to find crimes to pin on him. They have identified him, and they are out to get him one way or another. “Persecution” or “harassment” would more accurately convey Trump’s meaning.
Such distinctions are crucial. When federal authorities charged gangster Al Capone with tax evasion in 1931, it was not a witch hunt. The target of their investigation was determined first; then the charges that could put him away were identified – an application of the rule of law.
The second phrase that pervaded 2020 was “black swan.” When the new coronavirus spread beyond China and suddenly affected the health and jobs of people around the world, many described it as a quintessential “black swan” event.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's eponymous 2007 book turned black swan virtually into a household expression, because it appeared to describe the 2007-09 financial crisis so well. Taleb defined the term to mean a major event that nobody realized was even a possibility, because they had never seen one of its kind before. But the metaphor is more insightful than that.