How ‘ghoul’ became a go-to insult in politics
Why “Ghoul” Has Become a Potent Political Insult
Goldlaner.com – As Election Day on November 3 approaches, political rhetoric has taken on a distinctly Halloween-season flavor. The word “ghoul,” once reserved for folklore and horror stories, has become a sharp accusation aimed at public figures across the political spectrum.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican nominee for Ohio governor, recently became the focus of that language after his campaign ran an advertisement featuring the estranged mother of his opponent, Amy Acton. The mother’s husband had been charged with raping Acton when she was a child. Andrew Weinstein, who served in the Obama and Biden administrations, described Ramaswamy on Bluesky in especially blunt terms.
“Vivek Ramaswamy … is an absolute ghoul.”
Pennsylvania Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, the Democratic Party’s vice chair, made a similar accusation on X.
“Vivek is a ghoul.”
The insult is not confined to one campaign or ideology. In recent weeks, critics have used it against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in connection with his plan to livestream a firing-squad execution, and against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after his address to the United Nations General Assembly.
Republicans have used the term as well. Earlier this year, a Republican strategist called former Washington Gov. Jay Inslee a “soulless ghoul” after a social media post made following a shooting at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. The Trump White House also deployed the word last year, applying it to a journalist who said Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. had fled a medical emergency in the Oval Office. A writer who challenged President Donald Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to Washington, DC, was called a “sick, disgusting ghoul.”
A Charge of Predation and Cruelty
Calling someone a ghoul does more than suggest bad judgment or cynical politics. It casts the target as a figure who feeds on pain, fear or misfortune. Fielding Montgomery, researcher and author of Horror Framing and the General Election, describes the phrase as a means of stripping an opponent of ordinary humanity.
“It’s in a sense a dehumanization tactic,” Montgomery said. “It’s that they are a monster … that they are particularly taking advantage of people or preying on people.”
That meaning helps explain why the term travels so easily through modern politics. It is compact, emotionally vivid and rooted in a familiar horror image. Someone branded a ghoul is not merely portrayed as insensitive; they are depicted as exploiting suffering for personal or political advantage.
From Arab Folklore to Western Horror
The English word has a long and shifting history. “Ghoul” traces through the French goule to the Arabic ġūl, itself connected to ġāla, meaning “to seize.” Its origins lie in pre-Islamic Arab traditions, where the creature became a lasting subject of fear and fascination.
Scholar Ahmed Al-Rawi wrote in 2009 that the ghoul’s identity was never fixed. It could be understood as a devil, genie, spirit, enchantress of genies or a devilish genie. In many Arab folktales, however, the creature appeared as an unattractive female predator roaming the desert and misleading travelers.
The image changed dramatically in Europe during the early 18th century. Antoine Galland, the orientalist who translated One Thousand and One Nights into French, added traits that were not present in the Arabic originals. Most notably, Galland’s version associated ghouls with exhuming corpses and consuming human flesh.
That addition had lasting consequences. In Western imagination, the ghoul became a graveyard creature and cannibal, a monster defined by its appetite for the dead. European adaptations of the tales repeated this version. In “The Story of King Yunan and Duban the Sage,” for example, a prince encounters a being that initially takes the form of a beautiful woman before revealing itself as a hideous, flesh-eating monster.
Gothic Literature Gives the Ghoul a New Life
Writers of the Gothic period found the ghoul especially useful because it represented both physical horror and moral corruption. It appeared in William Beckford’s 1786 novel Vathek and in Lord Byron’s poem The Giaour. Edgar Allan Poe also used the term in his 1849 poem “The Bells.”
“They are neither man nor woman— They are neither brute nor human— They are Ghouls.”
By the 19th century, the monster had become a metaphor. Writers began applying “ghoul” to people who seemed to relish tragedy or profit from another person’s downfall. William Makepeace Thackeray used the word in his 1854 novel The Newcomes to describe people as “Ghouls feasting on the fresh corpse of a reputation.”
That figurative meaning is remarkably close to its current political use. The modern accusation does not usually suggest that a person is literally monstrous. Instead, it implies that they are feeding on damage done to others: a victim’s trauma, a public disaster, a medical scare or a moment of national grief.
The Monster Keeps Changing
Fiction continued to reshape the ghoul during the 20th century. H.P. Lovecraft offered another influential version in his 1927 story “Pickman’s Model,” portraying ghouls as underground creatures with dog-like characteristics. Rehan Hyder, writing in The Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, noted that Lovecraft later brought the character Richard Pickman back as a ghoul in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.
That transformation carried a disturbing implication: a human being could deteriorate into something less than human. The idea remains embedded in the insult’s power. Calling a public figure a ghoul suggests not simply a disagreement over policy, but a claim that the person has crossed a moral boundary.
In an era of rapid-fire posts and campaign attacks, the word’s centuries of baggage make it unusually effective. It evokes graveyards, predation, deception and the consumption of human suffering—all in a single syllable. Its current political popularity may be seasonal, but its endurance reflects a much older urge to describe perceived cruelty with the language of monsters.
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