Is history repeating itself and will the result be the same?

[lees1975]

https://signalpress.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-bad-political-move-that-ended.html

It seems strange that, out of the 47 different Presidencies in the history of the United States, one of its founding fathers who served as President would be evaluated as one of the worst Presidents in history. Someone who helped Thomas Jefferson draft the Declaration of Independence, who was known as one of its primary supporters, who served in the Continental Congress, and as a diplomat representing the United States in Europe during the latter years of the Revolutionary War, and who was the author of the Massachusetts constitution, which was a model for the United States Constitution, should have been a staunch patriot, a believer in American idealism and a successful early leader of his people.

John Adams was a great man, a great patriot, and he did a lot for the United States of America, except serving as one of its more effective Presidents. The one thing Adams failed at was serving as President. He failed to discern, at a critical point of impending crisis, the necessity of maintaining the principles of the Constitution, specifically the limits it placed on government and the guarantees of individual liberties that it provided. His actions prompted the passage of a set of four specific laws, three of which were open violations of most of the Bill of Rights, known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

These acts opened the door to the repression of civil liberties of free speech and freedom of the press, justified by nebulous threats to "national security" which Adams perceived as a result of a dispute with France, that included attempts by the French government to become involved in political subversion in order to push the Congress toward passing the kinds of laws and economic policies favorable to them. So Adams signed these acts into law.

Though the American people, through their legislators and ultimately through the courts, rejected all but one of the Alien and Sedition Acts, on Constitutional grounds, and have established that national security does not trump the Bill of Rights under any circumstances, we see the echoes of the same level of lack of discernment, fear of criticism and lack of comprehension of the limits of government in the Constitution when it comes to civil liberties of the people, coming out of the Trump White House. The sitting President is putting himself in the same bad position as Adams, whose historical reputation of being one of the worst Presidents in history rests on his support for the Alien and Sedition Acts.

What we have is a sitting President whining and complaining openly, doing everything he can to supress and shut down the free press, and free speech, desiring to jail, or execute, politicians who are critical of his incompetence, displaying his pathetic--and inexcuseable--ignorance of both American History and the United States Consitution. He is, with his own words, indicting himself, and making a case for being compared to one of the worst Presidents in history, and for being evaluated as one of the worst.