Abstract
This article examines the phenomenon of anti‐Trump witchcraft, popularized by Michael Hughes’s viral 2017 ritual (“A Spell to Bind Donald Trump and All Those Who Abet Him”), as an instance of register circulation and ultimately register synthesis. Drawing on a digital ethnography of the #MagicResistance movement, including videotaped rituals and interviews with practitioners, the analysis finds that practitioners use the affordance of register incongruity in mediatized online contexts to publicly intertwine the language of American witchcraft with political stance‐taking, disseminating indexical links between witchcraft and leftist political orientations. Practitioners variously characterize the language of #MagicResistance rituals as a mismatch between or a synthesis of two registers, demonstrating that register (in)congruity is interactionally constructed rather than prediscursive. Furthermore, practitioners emphasize the cathartic and empowering effects of ritual practice, showing how register circulation—often analyzed at the macrosocial level—manifests in relation to microsocial agency and affect.
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