Editor: A history lesson. How a law written in 1789 is being used to free the United States from tyranny. The parallels between John Adams and Trump, lessons learned over 227 years.
A 1798 law is being used right now to defend American sovereignty.
John Adams wrote it.
Jefferson tried to repeal it the moment he took office. He couldn’t. It had no expiration date.
Donald Trump invoked it on March 15, 2025 — 227 years after Adams signed it.
Same law. Same fight. Same establishment screaming the same names.
Here’s the documented history.
1797: France was robbing America blind.
316 merchant ships seized in 11 months — Secretary of State Pickering read the exact number to Congress.
Almost no Navy left. The last warship had been sold a decade earlier. The young republic was polarized, broke, and humiliated on the open seas.
Adams didn’t flinch.
He stood up the Department of the Navy (April 30, 1798), launched USS Constitution and the great frigates, and funded it all with protective tariffs that shielded American shipyards and workers — nearly 90% of federal revenue. He treated French economic warfare as an existential threat to American sovereignty.
When Hamilton and his own Federalists screamed for a full land invasion, Adams said no. He endured the XYZ Affair insults, sent diplomats, and signed the Convention of 1800. The Quasi-War was fought ship to ship in the Caribbean — no invasion, no quagmire, no land war on foreign soil.
Republic survived.
They destroyed him anyway.
And the reason they could is the same reason they’re trying to destroy Trump. Nine pressure points. Nine identical battles. Two centuries apart. The difference is Trump is fighting with Adams’ map in hand.
Nine parallels. Two presidents. Every one documented.
1. THE PRESS — Adams believed the press wasn’t covering his presidency. It was running a coordinated operation to destroy it. He signed the Sedition Act under pressure from his own party — 25 arrested, 10 convicted. Congressman Matthew Lyon jailed four months for calling Adams pompous. Lyon ran his re-election from jail, won with nearly double his opponent’s votes, then cast the deciding congressional vote that ended Adams’ presidency. The man Adams tried to silence ended his career with a single vote. Trump sees the same press operation and names it every day. He never handed them a law to wave at him. He fights it in the open instead of legislating against it. Same war. Corrected weapon.
2. TOTAL POLARIZATION — Adams governed a country so divided that both parties believed the other was an existential threat to the republic — and the nation was barely ten years old. He tried to stand above the partisan war, believing the presidency was too important for faction. His opponents read it as weakness, moved in for the kill, and won. Trump governs during the highest partisan polarization in modern American history and fights inside the battle instead of above it. He learned the lesson Adams paid for with his presidency: you cannot be neutral in a war where one side is trying to destroy you.
3. EXECUTIVE POWER UNDER FIRE — Adams expanded federal authority through the Alien and Sedition Acts during a genuine national security crisis. Courts and opponents called it unconstitutional overreach. He signed it, absorbed the backlash — and went quiet, believing the policy would eventually vindicate itself. Going quiet handed the narrative to his enemies and he never got it back. Trump has pushed executive orders, emergency declarations, and border authority to their fullest extent and watched courts push back in real time. The difference: Trump fights every legal challenge publicly, loudly, on offense from day one. He never lets silence fill with someone else’s version of the story.
4. NATIONAL SECURITY AS EXISTENTIAL — Adams looked at 316 seized merchant ships, French agents on American soil, and a foreign power dictating American foreign policy and called it an existential threat to sovereignty. His opponents called him a warmonger manufacturing a crisis to grab power. Trump looks at millions of illegal crossings, systematic trade warfare, and documented foreign interference and calls it an existential threat to sovereignty. His opponents call him a fearmonger manufacturing a crisis to grab power. This is not metaphor. This is the same accusation, the same framing, the same dismissal — deployed by the same class of people against the same kind of president, two centuries apart and word for word identical.
5. ELITE HATRED — Jeffersonian Republicans called Adams a monarchist, a tyrant, a man who wanted to crown himself king. His own Federalists called him erratic, unstable, and dangerous to the republic. Both establishments from opposite directions simultaneously decided he was the greatest threat to democracy they had ever seen. The modern establishment calls Trump a dictator, an authoritarian, a threat to democratic norms. Both parties’ institutions decided he was the greatest threat to democracy they had ever seen. Opposite sides. Identical script. The difference: Trump saw it coming, named it first, and turned their coordinated hatred into the most powerful organizing tool in modern American politics. Adams never understood what was hitting him until it was over.
6. ELECTORAL WARFARE — Adams lost 1800 in one of the bitterest elections in American history — attacked simultaneously by Jefferson’s Republicans from the outside and Hamilton’s Federalists from inside his own party, abandoned by every institution that should have defended him. Trump was impeached twice, lost 2020 under the full weight of institutional opposition from both parties, and came back in 2025 stronger than before. The difference is the one that rewrites everything: Trump came back. Adams went home. Only one of those sentences ends in vindication.
7. BETRAYAL FROM WITHIN — Hamilton didn’t oppose Adams from across the aisle. He ran a shadow operation through Adams’ own cabinet — briefing opponents with inside intelligence, writing pamphlets against his own president, organizing the 1800 defeat from inside the building Adams trusted with his presidency. Adams saw it developing and moved too slowly. By the time he acted, the damage was irreversible. Trump faced the same architecture in his first term — officials slow-walking orders, leaking to the press, running their own agendas from inside the West Wing. The difference: Trump’s second term opened with immediate, systematic loyalty audits across every department. He had seen the playbook run once. He didn’t give it a second act.
8. PERSONALITY AS THE STORY — Adams was thin-skinned, combative, and proud — and his combativeness built walls where he needed bridges. He alienated the allies who might have protected him, handed Hamilton exactly the internal fracture he needed, and made enemies of people who started as neutrals. His personality was the crack in the foundation. Trump’s directness and confrontational style dominate the narrative exactly the same way — personality is the headline before policy is the story. The difference: Trump’s combativeness generates loyalty at scale. His base doesn’t just tolerate the fighting — they came for it. Same raw material. One man’s liability became another man’s army.
9. HISTORY WILL JUDGE — Adams retired to Quincy in what felt like total disgrace — bitter, isolated, convinced history would forget him. Then the unexpected happened: he and Jefferson — who had spent years trying to destroy each other — reconciled through a decade of extraordinary private letters. They both died on July 4, 1826, fifty years to the day after the Declaration of Independence. History had already reached its verdict: Adams was right about almost everything that mattered. The names they called him are footnotes. The Navy he built lasted two centuries. The law he signed was never repealed. Trump governs with the understanding that the screaming crowd of 2025 is not the court that writes the final verdict. That is the lesson Adams learned too late and Trump has carried since the beginning.
The parallels show where they stand on the same ground. What separates them is five decisions Adams got wrong — and Trump is getting right.
Five lessons Adams got wrong — and how Trump is not repeating them:
LESSON 1:
THE ENEMY INSIDE IS DEADLIEST — The threat that finished Adams didn’t come from Jefferson’s Republicans. It came through his own cabinet — the people he trusted with his presidency, running a coordinated operation against him from inside the building. Moving too slowly to purge them was the single most costly operational mistake of his presidency. Trump’s second term opened with immediate, systematic loyalty audits across every department before the opposition had time to embed. Same threat. No second act.
LESSON 2:
ALOOFNESS IS POLITICAL SUICIDE — Knowing the enemy is inside is only half the battle. The other half is fighting. Adams believed the president should stand above partisan conflict. Historians identify it as the decision that cost him re-election — his refusal to fight directly left him isolated even when every policy was correct. The record never speaks for itself. Someone has to speak for it, every day, in every arena, louder than the people trying to bury it. Adams didn’t. That single difference is why one man went home in 1801 and the other came back in 2025.
LESSON 3: NEVER HAND THE PRESS A LAW — The Sedition Act didn’t silence the press. It made the press the story. A jailed congressman became a martyr, won re-election from prison with nearly double the votes, then cast the deciding vote that ended Adams’ presidency. Adams won every legal argument and lost the entire political war. Trump exposes the press operation publicly, names it, and keeps fighting without ever handing them legislation to weaponize. The war is the same. The method is completely different. The outcome will be too.
LESSON 4: RESTRAINT IS PRECISION, NOT RETREAT — Adams refused Hamilton’s land invasion against enormous internal pressure. No quagmire. No debt spiral. No land war on foreign soil. The republic survived because Adams chose the surgical option when everyone around him was demanding the catastrophic one. Trump has kept zero new wars despite relentless pressure from every direction. Strength deployed precisely builds deterrence that lasts. Strength performed for theater burns credibility that doesn’t come back.
LESSON 5:
GOVERN FOR THE VERDICT, NOT THE CROWD — The crowd that screamed at Adams is dust. The Navy he built patrolled American commerce for two centuries. The law he signed is active today — invoked 227 years later by another America First president fighting the same battle Adams fought. Trump is building the same kind of record right now. Adams had to wait decades for history to reach its verdict. Trump is watching it arrive in real time.
The parallels prove they’re the same. The lessons prove Trump is doing it better. One thing remains to be said — not as a concession, but as the thing that makes this argument bulletproof.
Adams was a lifelong revolutionary and constitutional theorist. Trump came from business. Their crises had different textures. The parallel is structural — not a carbon copy.
The structure is exact: military built from near nothing, tariffs as sovereignty tools, press treated as a political combatant, internal betrayal through the cabinet, elite hatred from both parties simultaneously, and a governing philosophy that places the judgment of history above the noise of the moment.
Nine parallels. Five lessons. Two presidents. All of it drawn from the documented record — and tied together by one law that was never repealed.
The Alien Enemies Act Adams wrote in 1798 survived Jefferson’s attempt to repeal it, outlasted four more wars, and was invoked by Trump on March 15, 2025 — proof that what Adams built wasn’t just for his moment. It was for every moment after.
Adams lost the election.
He won the country.
They screamed at Adams. History answered.
They’re screaming at Trump.
The law Adams wrote in 1798 is still defending America in 2026.
History doesn’t forget the ones who build to last.
Sunny's Journal 