Note to Trump: Founding Father John Adams Was Passionate about Due Process

A future president of the United States, John Adams, was so passionate about due process that he defended British soldiers who were accused in the Boston Massacre.

The Daily is journalism that is fighting for democracy. Please support us by becoming a subscriber.

The Trump administration’s approach to immigration and dissenters on university campuses is egregious and anti-American for many reasons, but one of the most fundamental is the way they conflate an (often unfounded!) accusation of criminality with being found guilty.

Donald Trump knows personally that the process of being found guilty of a crime, or 34 felonies in his case, is a long, drawn out process. He was given every chance to defend himself, he was given extra courtesies not extended to most people. So he knows that there’s a long road to travel to prove a defendant committed a crime.

Yet, his entire policies are based on skipping the evidence and prosecution part, and moving right on to sentencing in a way that is a violation of human rights.

When President, Founding Father John Adams actually signed into law the very law Trump is using to justify disguised, masked and seemingly unprofessional and untrained people to kidnap people off the streets.

Adams signed Alien Enemies Act of 1798, alongside the Sedition Act, which became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts.

Notably, Trump 2.0 pardoned approximately 1500 Proud Boys and Oath Keepers who were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their actions on January 6th, 2021 after Trump incited his followers with false claims of a stolen election (he is now having the cyber security expert who declared it a safe election).

At any rate, Adams’ reputation was sullied for signing the Sedition Act, he was painted as anti-free speech and free press. The Sedition Act was intended to deal with the then perceived threat of the French and their supporters here in the U.S. (insert Russia for a comparison to how a threat like this is dealt with today).

“The Sedition Act made it illegal to ‘write, print, utter or publish … any false, scandalous and malicious’ statements, particularly those that might ‘stir up sedition within the United States, or to excite any unlawful combinations therein, for opposing or resisting any law of the United States,’” Marianne Holdzkom, an Adams scholar, writes in the Free Speech Center.

Thomas Jefferson, who succeeded Adams in 1801, feared these acts would mean the end of the republic, and even mentioned that it would lead to Congress declaring — visions of Ivanka is his head?— that “the President shall continue in office during life [and] reserving to another occasion the transfer of succession to his heirs.”

“If this goes down, we shall immediately see attempted another act of Congress declaring that the President shall continue in office during life [and] reserving to another occasion the transfer of succession to his heirs.”

Struggling to balance the rights of Americans with national security is an ongoing issue, and in fact it will always be an issue in any country that is upholding freedom. Freedom is something fought for and then protected or lost.

Holdzkom notes, “The Alien and Sedition Acts were mistakes that Adams lived to regret. Reviving any of them today would be, in my opinion, a worse one.”

Due Process

One of the excuses you’ve probably heard trotted out for Trump deporting a baby with cancer and sending a seemingly innocent man to an El Salvadorean prison (which is NOT deportation, but rather more akin to a concentration camp) is that these people were “guilty” and “here illegally” and had “committed crimes.”

Not because a judge or jury found them guilty, but because Donald Trump’s grotesquely incompetent administration decided they were guilty because they have a tattoo that looks suspicious to said incompetents.

We can’t expect more from a gang led by a man who has had not one, but two Signalgates and yet has his priorities such that he is spending a lot of money to build a makeup studio in the Pentagon. These are not serious people; but, they are seriously incompetent.

It’s ironic that the same Alien and Sedition Acts John Adams defended British soldiers accused in the Boston Massacre because he believed so passionately in the right to a fair trial and a vigorous defense, which is part of due process.

“Although a devout patriot, John Adams agreed to risk his family’s livelihood an`d defend the British soldiers and their commander in a Boston courtroom. At stake was not just the fate of nine men, but the relationship between the motherland and her colonies on the eve of American Revolution,” History wrote.

They asked Dan Abrams why Adams took the case. “The main reason was that he felt everyone was entitled to a defense.”

And there it is. Abrams continues, saying that the case against the soldiers was not clear, was not even what “we” are taught in school (in quotes because I was not taught this at school).

What we know didn’t happen is what most of us learn in school—this idea of British soldiers mowing down colonists. What exactly led to that first shot being fired is still unclear even today, but I think that Adams had to go a step further here. I think he had to show that these soldiers were in fear, and I think he did.

The larger point about the debate over what really happened during the Boston Massacre is that things often look one way until they look another way.

Evidence is nuanced and one new piece can flip a case on its side.

We see this back and forth in the Karen Read case, in the Blake Lively case as covered in the New York Times with potentially misleadingly edited text messages (who edited those text messages if they were edited remains at issue) that have now been brought into dispute versus the footage and other not yet vetted evidence shared by Justin Baldoni (please don’t yell at me until after you’ve read both links and watched the video and remember, I used to work on Hollywood sets and have covered sexual harassment since 2011, siding with many women with whom I disagree about practically everything else) in his defamation suit against Lively, and certainly we see it in Trump concentration camp cases where even this administration flailed about trying to “prove” guilt with nothing but vibes to go on.

Evidence matters! We can’t just run around going on our gut because we care about an issue that seems to be at play. The truth is often not what we thought it was, which is disconcerting, but also a good reminder to check our own confirmation biases.