Oct 30, 2019 2:27 PM

Trump's Presidency Has Spawned a New Generation of Witches

Magic has long been a form of protest, but resistance through sorcery has burst into the mainstream consciousness only twice in recent memory: during the 1960s, and now.

A hand puts a pin in a voodoo doll next to some burning candles

On midnight last Friday, all over the United States, an alliance of magical practitioners called the Magic Resistance gathered Tarot cards, feathers, orange and white candles, pins, water, salt, matches, ashtrays, and unflattering photos of President Trump. The objects are prerequisites for a binding spell, an incantation typically used to keep someone from harming themselves or others, like a magical straitjacket. They use the pin to scratch “Donald J. Trump” into the orange candle (baby carrots are a sanctioned substitute) and read aloud a spell first posted on Medium. It begins: “Hear me, oh spirits of Water, Fire, Earth, and Air, heavenly hosts, demons of the infernal realms, and spirits of the ancestors … I call upon you to bind Donald J. Trump so that his malignant works may fail utterly.” It ends with burning the unflattering Trump photo and telling it, “You’re fired!”

The binding ritual is the 33rd of its kind, the Magic Resistance having cast the spell during each waning crescent moon since February 24, 2017. In the eyes of the witches and other occultists performing the rite, each instance has been a success.

In 1967, during the Vietnam War, the Youth International Party, better known as the yippies, decided that the Pentagon was in need of an exorcism—and a levitation. They requested a permit to lift the Pentagon 300 feet in the air; the permit administrator only granted them a levitation of 10 feet, maximum. That October, as part of a much larger march, some 35,000 protesters tried to encircle the Pentagon, but were quelled and arrested by security. It didn’t matter. “The levitation of the Pentagon was a happening that demystified the authority of the military,” Allen Ginsberg, one of the exorcism’s organizers, said. “The Pentagon was symbolically levitated in people’s minds.”

Magic (and particularly witchcraft) has been a form of protest for decades, probably centuries, but protest magic has burst into the media and broader public consciousness only twice in recent memory: during the 1960s and now, during Trump’s presidency. In the ‘60s there were the yippies, but also the Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell—W.I.T.C.H.—a pointy-hatted wing of the women’s liberation movement. These days, as The New York Times recently noted, it seems like everyone is a witch: friends, coworkers, baristas, the covens of Tumblr and Instagram hawking crystal amulets and spell books, tweeters casting emoji spells, protesters holding up signs with slogans like, “We are the granddaughters of the witches you failed to burn.” Evangelical Christian news sites are denouncing the rise of witchcraft and Satanism; Netflix and other studios, bolstered by the success of shows like The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, are ordering witch flick after witch flick; President Trump is constantly declaring himself the victim of a “WITCH HUNT!” This is the new era of the witch.

Of course, witchcraft, Wicca, and the occult never really went away. They’ve just had variances in their level of acceptableness. In some countries, like Saudi Arabia, witchcraft is still considered a serious crime, and sometimes a capital offense. This April, two Indonesian domestic workers who spent a decade on death row after being accused of practicing witchcraft against the Saudi Arabian families who employed them, finally had their sentences commuted after the Indonesian government intervened. In the US, UK, and elsewhere, cultures have slanted toward being witch-neutral or witch-positive. In Scotland, people are calling for a memorial for women executed for witchcraft 400 years ago. In Portland, Oregon, a flotilla of hundreds of witches paddle-boarded down the Willamette River last weekend for charity. In other communities in the United States, revealing that you practice magic is seen as dangerous and referred to as “coming out of the broom closet.” Point being: The politics of the occult are weird and complicated and region-specific, but, unless you’re eight and it’s Halloween, they pretty much always exist. Which makes sense because witchcraft (and witch hunts) are all about power. Right now, lots of people feel like they don’t have any.

For some, witchcraft is something of an aesthetic. (See: the crystal salespeople of Instagram, most of whom do not seem to be going around hexing people.) But even for those who do consider themselves genuine magical practitioners of some stripe, what power, specifically, their magic can pull off is a layered question.

Michael Hughes, author of the viral Trump binding spell, calls himself a magician, though he doesn’t mean it in the David Blaine way. In 2017, he wrote the spell as a lark, something he thought his small circle of occult-curious friends would appreciate, but with direct political intent. “In order for something to break through the public consciousness, it had to be as weird and surreal and out of left field as Trump and Trump world was becoming,” he says. “I’d seen the Women’s March and the March for Science, tens of thousands of people show up in DC, and it barely makes a blip in the news, much less the little social media silos we’re in.”

That little bit of witchery was apparently just weird enough, because he suddenly found himself inundated with media requests. According to Hughes, TV stations pestered him so much in their quest to film witches (who are generally a private bunch) that he lied to them, telling them that witches would be congregating outside Trump Tower in New York City to conduct the binding ritual. Just by telling it, his lie came true. And, when he live-streamed his own binding spell, 60,000 people tuned in. So they made the Bind Trump Facebook group, hexed the NRA, and bound Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. “I think it’s totally working,” Hughes says.

Hughes doesn’t expect his spell to literally snap Trump’s arms and legs together, Petrificus totalus style. “We feel so powerless. It’s easy to get beaten down,” Hughes says. “The ritual is like a self-exorcism.” It’s less a replacement for calling your congressperson than a spiritual companion to that activism, in Hughes’ view. A way to keep going, to keep the faith, as it were, in trying times. “Any progressive social movement needs a spiritual aspect to keep from burning out and to keep people engaged,” he says.

He also thinks that he and others are really pulling off magic, and online groups are bursting with what magic practitioners see as evidence of their success. “The World Series booing was two days after the binding. Coincidence?” writes one group member. “I think not.” Another sees evidence of the binding’s effectiveness in Trump being prevented from shrinking Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. “Huzzah! He is bound!” they write. Did it work? Did the Pentagon levitate? Maybe it doesn’t matter at all.