Trump campaign holds a Halloween 'Witch Hunt Party'

MANHEIM, Pa. - The Trump campaign gathering was billed as a "Halloween Witch Hunt Party" near edenic Lancaster, in the appropriately named Spooky Nook Sports, a massive indoor youth sports facility. But where on Halloween Eve, and the eve of the House vote on the impeachment probe, were those witches?

Presumably in Washington, skulking around the basement of the Capitol. The leading trio of witches, according to the campaign, are "Shifty Schiff, Nervous Nancy and Democrat Hack Jerry Nadler" - House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Judiciary Committee Chairman Nadler. Key figures in the impeachment inquiry, recast here as ghouls of thehaunted House.

But here at Team Trump's witch hunt party, it was the witches who were supposedly doing the hunting - an inversion ofearly American history and every high school reading of Arthur Miller's "The Crucible." Really, this was more of a witch hunter-hunter party, vaguely styled as a show trial.

Presiding over the euphoric Lancaster County crowd of nearly 200 supporters were "Judge" Diamond and "Judge" Silk, YouTube sibling sensations and Trump enthusiasts Lynnette Hardaway and Rochelle Richardson attired in judge's robes.

"We're going to be the judge, the jury, the prosecutors and the witnesses!" exclaimed Diamond in a windowless "Motivate" room, standing in front of an orange Trump banner featuring a bat and spider web, flanked by inflatable witches. "This is witch hunt 2.0. It's collusion, delusion, having turned into a lying illusion! Ding dong, the witch hunt is dead!"

The metaphor is, anyway. Sentenced to death by torture.

Diamond and Silk, along with Trump sweethearts Mercedes and Matt Schlapp, are rotating members of the Trump campaign's touring ensemble, visiting essential counties in must-win swing states. In 2016, Trump won Lancaster County by 20 points. Two years ago, a month before his victory, he hosted a rally in this same facility named for the road where its situated.

The campaign's attempt to manifest the president's "witch hunt" complaints as a themed campaign event were buffeted by merch, which are as conceptually baffling as the event. The Trump campaign's new limited-edition poster and T-shirt are modeled after the ad campaign for the 1993 crone romp "Hocus Pocus." They appear to depict Pelosi, Schiff and Nadler, though it's hard to tell. Pelosi resembles a disheveled Agnes Moorhead circa "Bewitched." Adam Schiff looks like a drag Gore Vidal. Nadler resembles . . . something, possibly Martin Short's anxious Nathan Thurm with Harry Potter glasses, Jerry Lewis hair and a twin set of ample chins.

Mick Garris, one of the "Hocus Pocus" creators, complained this week on Twitter: "I object in every way his attempt to co-opt, no matter how poorly, our creation. Leave our witches alone, oh Evil One."

Supporters who showed up to the witch hunt huntwere gifted with orange caps featuring jack-o'-lanterns on the front, and "Make America Great!" on the back. The crowd listed toward retirement age; Instead of candy, there were tables of fruit and crudities, and a cash bar. There were plenty of MAGA hats and Trump T-shirts, but few actual Halloween costumes.

Karla Besecker Goldbach, a special-education teacher from Lancaster, was an exception . . . sort of. She came dressed as Trump, complete with a latex mask. "He tells it like it is. He's a real person," she said.

Oct. 30 is a vital date in Trumpworld, Ivanka's birthday (38). Mercedes Schlapp, a former White House director of strategic communications who's now with the campaign, pulled out her cellphone and asked the crowd to sing "Happy Birthday" to the first daughter.

The Schlapps, working the room like a lounge act without the piano,riffed on the scary Halloween costumes they were considering as a couple. "If you're Bernie, and I'm Elizabeth Warren," said Mercedes, then "we're communist comrades." The crowd howled, as it did with every mention of socialism, Democrats, the media, the deep state and Hillary Clinton.

"They're telling us we're racist. They're telling us our plastic straws are killing turtles," said Matt Schlapp, who is chairman of the American Conservative Union and a Fox News fixture. Then, to make sure he had the crowd, he invoked somewhere truly spooky. "Have you been to San Francisco?"

Laughs, boos.

Diamond took the occasion to invoke a historic horror more raw than the Salem witch trials.

"Our president is being lynched, and we are not going to stand for it," she said, using aterm for extrajudicial killings strongly associated with racial terror against black Americans, which the president has used to describe his struggle against the House's impeachment inquiry.

The historical allusions kept on coming, as muddled as the merch and the metaphors. "Old Bernie Sanders looks like he's stuck in the Revolutionary War," Diamond said.

Trump is of this moment, his fans said, and without affect."When he promises something, he talks like a real human being so you can understand. He doesn't make it flowery," said Donnagail D'Amico, a retired speech therapist from Hanover, in a sparkly Lady Liberty T-shirt and Trump cap. "I went into supporting Trump skeptically. I didn't like his behavior on television. I thought he was nasty."

Now, she's a true believer. The economy is booming, D'Amico said, unemployment is nonexistent, and she and her husband have $2,000 extra in their tax returns. "Trump knows the most important thing is money," she said. That's when the world is truly frightening. "If you don't have money," D'Amico said, "you don't have a place to sleep, anything to eat, clothes to wear."

Trump-attired Besecker Goldbach said "I didn't vote for him to be professional. I voted for him to get stuff done." She used a curse word, though not the sort found in a spellbook.

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