An ignoramus, Trump will know nothing about where the notion of the witch hunt comes from. Lots of ordinary Americans, too, have wondered what it means and searches for the term on Merriam-Webster's dictionary site have spiked by more than 8000 per cent since Trump's latest tweet.

All this talk of witch-hunting has sent me flying back in time (on a broomstick borrowed from the High Priestess of Pagan Woden-Weston) to the Canberra of late 1993 and early 1994. In those angry days Roslyn 'Ros' Kelly MP was complaining of a witch hunt against her.

She was the federal member for Canberra and the Keating government's Minister for Sport (and I was a fresh-faced and flaxen-haired parliamentary sketch writer). There unfolded the exhilarating "Sports Rorts Affair" (go to Wikipedia for the full, grisly saga). Minister Kelly was accused of cunningly ensuring that federal sports grants went to those marginal electorates where they would do Keating's ALP government the most good.

The Opposition hounded her. The leading hounds (how they barked and slavered, just like Hounds of the Baskervilles!) were John Hewson and Peter Costello.

I was in the House plying my trade during some of the white heat of the crisis and during one especially snarling Question Time the poor, beleaguered minister shrilled "This is just a witch hunt!"

"Yes, and YOU'RE the witch!" an opposition member chortled, whereupon his side of the chamber broke into cackles of sexist glee at this classy witticism.

At the time (and still today whenever I think of it) the witch-hunting of Ros Kelly seemed a dramatic and a poignant thing. This was partly to do with Kelly being a woman and with so much of the pursuing and persecuting of her having a snarlingly sexist ring to it. Something in my sensitive nature (for with my poetic temperament I was never properly emotionally equipped to report the beastliness of politics) was appalled by the cruelty of it.

Early in 1994 these witch-hunting pressures saw Kelly resign. Ultimately it all led to her resignation from parliament and, at the resulting by-election on 25 March 1995, the government amazingly lost the Labor seat of Canberra. There was a scarcely believable (itself suggestive of right-wing witchcraft) swing of 16 per cent against Labor in this normally ultra-safe Labor seat. It was a spellbinding (and I use that word advisedly in this witch-hunt context) start for the Liberal candidate, the boyish Brendan Smyth.

Still with witchery, of course in more recent times it suited the most appalling Australians (shepherded by the cunningly rabble-rousing Tony Abbott and Bronwyn Bishop) to use the ugly slogan "Ditch The Witch!" against PM Julia Gillard.

But back to the US where Trump's use of "witch hunt" has some scholarly thinkers scoffing.

In a robust essay for the New York Times Annalisa Quinn notes that given Trump's narcissism " 'Witch hunt' seems like a particularly Trumpish complaint - an unshakable belief in his own persecution leading him to compare his own experiences to vastly worse ones".

"But an obsession with the witch hunt long precedes him in American politics", Quinn continues.

And she goes back in witch hunt history to when "in the 16th and 17th centuries, a frenzy of witch trials engulfed parts of Europe and [America's] New England".

"Witch 'finders' … thought they were fighting God's battles against satanic foes trying to upend the structures of religion, government and community. Witches were shape-shifters, embodying the murky and limitless depths of human dread … They were thought to be devil-worshipers who had sex with demons. Old women and young girls were stripped and searched for evidence of third nipples - on which Satan's imps were thought to suck - and tortured until they confessed, implicating others in desperation. Tens of thousands of people, mostly women, were killed, in a grim fulfillment of the command in Exodus that 'Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.' "

Yes, now that I think about it, another thing that made the aggressive witch hunting of Ros Kelly and Julia Gillard so vile was that it did have elements of wild-eyed evangelical fanaticism about it.

But every cloud has a silver lining of course the exorcising of Ros Kelly from the seat of Canberra was, as just mentioned above, the making of Brendan Smyth. The ACT Labor government, in Machiavellian forgiveness of Smyth's 1995 success in the seat of Canberra, has since made Smyth the ACT's first Commissioner for International Engagement.

How this imaginative invention of a job with so bewitching and pompous a title would have appealed to Gilbert and Sullivan, the best-ever lampooners of this sort of thing!

Did our Brendan actually know anything about International Engagement when he took this job? Or is it all reminiscent of G&S's HMS Pinafore in which the government appoints Sir Joseph Porter as First Lord of the Admiralty even though he has never been aboard a ship?