What John Adams Started, Trump Wants to Finish

Before there was January 6, 2021, there was May 9, 1798.

Amid the specter of a potential war with France, President John Adams had set the day aside as a “National Day of Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer,” urging all Americans to ask God to protect the nation from foreign threats and domestic disunity.

Instead, the opposite happened. Thousands of protesters — wearing red, white, and blue pins to showcase their support for Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party and their sympathies for France — thronged outside the president’s mansion in Philadelphia to protest Adams’ day of prayer and escalating tensions with the French. Soon, a rival mob emerged to defend the president, wearing black pins to show their allegiance to Adams’ Federalist Party.

The Federalists began tearing off the Democratic-Republicans’ pins. The Democratic-Republicans did the same to the Federalists. Just as the confrontation “threatened to burst into a full-scale brawl,” historian Lindsay Chervinksy writes in her book Making the Presidency, troops on horseback emerged to restore order.

Inside the president’s residence, Adams waited with a musket, just in case the 10,000-person mob assembled outside tried to invade his home.

The episode led to only a few injuries, but it left a legacy that stretches to this day: It helped spark the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a package of four bills written by Federalists to crack down on political dissent.

Three of the acts have long since been scrubbed from the books. The fourth, the Alien Enemies Act, is currently being used by President Trump in an attempt to deport migrants without due process, one of the most audacious elements of his far-reaching immigration agenda

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Scarred by the violence in May, the Federalists spent the summer of 1798 ramming the Alien and Sedition Acts through Congress, an attempt to silence critics of the government ahead of a possible war.

At the time, France and Great Britain were in near-constant conflict, and American politics were divided by disagreement about whose side to be on: the Anglophile Federalists who sympathized with England, or the Francophile Democratic-Republicans who were aligned with France. Under Adams’ Federalist administration, US tensions with France were running hot, leading to a series of naval skirmishes known as the “Quasi War.”

If the “Quasi War” escalated into full-blown conflict, Federalists were terrified that Democratic-Republicans would side with France over their own country. With that in mind, the Sedition Act made it a crime to "print, utter, or publish” any “false, scandalous, and malicious writing" about the government. The Federalists were also worried that the Democratic-Republicans would turn new immigrant voters against them. (It was effectively a Great Replacement Theory for the 18th century.) The Naturalization Act made it harder for immigrants to receive citizenship.

The Alien Enemies Act, meanwhile, was designed specifically for wartime. Under the law, if the US was at war or if a foreign government “perpetrated, attempted, or threatened” to invade the country, the president was empowered to deport any “natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government” who were “males of the age of fourteen years and upwards” and living in the US, but not naturalized American citizens.

More than 200 years later, Trump has come to view the Alien Enemies Act as a way around the typical legal process, arguing that it allows him to deport migrants without the court hearing they would normally be entitled to.

But, at the time, the law was understood to have the opposite effect, Chervinsky told me in a recent interview.

As controversial as it is today, the Alien Enemies Act was actually the only one of the Alien and Sedition Acts that received bipartisan support. That’s because it required actions from all three branches of government, explained Chervinsky, who serves as executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library. “It required the congressional declaration of war, it required a presidential proclamation, and then it required due process and a hearing for anyone they were trying to remove.”

It was only because of these guardrails that the law was “seen as a very reasonable war measure” by Federalists and Democratic-Republicans alike, Chervinsky said.

The Trump administration’s view of how to implement the Alien Enemies Act blows past these guardrails, invoking the statute without a declaration of war (he says that the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua’s presence in the U.S. constitutes a state-led “invasion”) and without granting due process to the migrants. Recently, Trump used the Alien Enemies Act to send 238 Venezuelan migrants to a notorious Salvadoran prison. His administration alleges that they are all gang members, although no court hearings were ever held to prove that contention.

The Supreme Court has since unanimously ruled that deportees under the Alien Enemies Act are required to receive due process, but the justices have yet to address the question of whether the Venezuelan gang’s presence in the US meets the definition of an invasion by a foreign government, or whether that question can even be litigated in the courts.

This would all be easier for Trump if only he could use the final Alien and Sedition Act: the Alien Friends Act.

Like the Alien Enemies Act, the Alien Friends Act also allowed the president to deport migrants. But unlike the Alien Enemies Act, the Alien Friends Act applied to natives of any country — friend or foe, invader or not — and gave its targets no judicial recourse. It gave President Adams more power, even if a formal war was never started.

But don’t mistake the Alien Friends Act and the Alien Enemies Act. “I almost feel, the way that sometimes people are talking about these efforts, like they’re confusing the two,” Chervinsky said. The Alien Friends Act expired in the 1800s, denying Trump a tool he could have used to remove natives from any country without due process.

Federalists timed the expiration of three of the four Alien and Sedition Acts so they wouldn’t last beyond the Adams administration, but the Alien Enemies Act was less controversial at the time and intended only for wartime use. It remained on the books, leaving the current administration to use only the least-far reaching of the four Alien and Sedition Acts.

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The 1790s and the 2020s have more in common than just unruly mobs approaching government buildings.

The same impulses that drove the Adams administration to promote the Alien and Sedition Acts (suspicion of immigrants, a desire to quash dissent) run through the Trump administration today. Just as the Federalists and Democratic-Republicans squabbled over whether to ally with Great Britain or France, our domestic politics are similarly divided by sympathies in foreign wars today, as various political movements align with Ukraine or Russia, or Israel or Gaza.

Political parties may have been brand-new in 1798, but the US had already grown deeply polarized, teeming with tensions that — much like they do today — seemed poised to explode at any moment. The Alien and Sedition Acts grew out of one toxic political environment. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that we would try to resurrect them during a time of enormous political discord.

The Alien Enemies Act was never invoked under Adams (although it later would be in the War of 1812 and both World Wars), but the government did prosecute several Democratic-Republican activists and newspaper editors under the Sedition Act Federalists even used the law to charge a sitting congressman, Matthew Lyon. (He managed to be re-elected from his jail cell.)

As today, the Adams-era moves led to a split among the opposition party about how to respond. “Some people wanted to wait for the electoral process to basically overturn it, to allow the people to be the ultimate arbiters of this question,” Chervinsky said. “Some people wanted to express that states could nullify the bill. Others wanted to have peaceful protests or to say that it was unconstitutional, but then not really do anything about it.”

Many of those Democratic-Republican debates would probably ring familiar to Democrats today.

Ultimately, the Alien and Sedition Acts proved unpopular when they were first enacted. “It didn't have the effect that was intended, because actually what it spawned was a massive explosion of [Democratic-Republican] newspapers and a pretty significant protest response,” Chervinky said.

And the unpopularity of the Alien and Sedition Acts soon helped lead to the sweeping defeat of the Federalists in the election of 1800. It is one of only three times in U.S. history that a party has flipped control of the House, Senate, and White House in a single cycle. They would control the presidency for the next 28 years.

Now, it is less evident that Trump will pay a political price for his use of an Alien and Sedition Act. Trump’s immigration policies remain the most popular part of his agenda: while his policies to address inflation are 16 points underwater with voters, his immigration polices are four points more approved than disapproved, according to an average compiled by pollster Adam Carlson.

But no matter the political consequences (or lack thereof), the legal system is already responding differently to Trump than to Adams. In 1798, the US had almost no case law regarding immigration or the First Amendment; many of the Sedition Act trials were overseen by Federalist judges who merely instructed juries to find the defendants guilty. Trump’s agenda has faced far more legal obstacles than Adams’ — and his use of the Alien Enemies Act is no exception.

US District Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocked Trump from invoking the law last month, taking issue with the president’s “unprecedented use of the Act outside of the typical wartime context.” The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Boasberg’s court was the wrong venue to bring the case, although separate proceedings are continuing to determine whether the administration complied with his order when it was in effect. (The 238 migrants deported under the law were flown on planes that left after Boasberg issued his order orally but before he published it in writing. On Tuesday, Boasberg said there was “probable cause” to hold the administration in criminal contempt for violating his orders.)

Still, since the Supreme Court ruling, judges in Colorado, Texas, and New York have temporarily blocked Trump from using the law against migrants detained in their jurisdictions, a further setback for Trump’s efforts to revive the 1798 statute.

For the Adams administration, the Alien and Sedition Acts offered a cheat code for getting around bothersome concerns like freedom of speech and the rule of law. But for Trump, with a more mature judicial system watching him, using the package’s one surviving measure has proven to be a bit more challenging.