Cal Thomas: Lessons from history

Cal Thomas, Tribune Content Agency on Oct 23, 2025

People who are protesting and complaining that President Trump is behaving like a dictator apparently skipped history classes or took them at liberal universities where professors have re-written the subject to conform to their worldview.

Someone who is doing what history teachers used to do may surprise you. He is Mark Levin, who hosts a daily syndicated radio program and weekend programs on Fox News Channel. Watch and listen if you are skeptical.

Last weekend, Levin reminded his audience that some who are regarded as some of our best presidents did things far worse than what Trump is accused of doing.

Levin reminded us that John Adams, one of America’s Founding Fathers, imprisoned several citizens under the Sedition Act, including four journalists. The Insurrection Act was used by Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant (Grant put down the Ku Klux Klan in the South). These and other presidents used the military to achieve political and social objectives.

Abraham Lincoln “shut down pro-peace newspapers, or papers thought to be sympathetic to the Confederacy during the Civil War. He suspended habeas corpus. Only Congress can do that.” Lincoln also “confiscated printing materials and sometimes imprisoned reporters, editors and publishers.”

Woodrow Wilson, “a favorite of the Democrats, was a racist and a bigot. He believed in eugenics. He also passed the Espionage Act in 1917 and a Sedition Act in 1918, so opponents of Wilson were charged and imprisoned on a scale never seen in American history.” These included 2,000 people, 1,200 of whom were imprisoned, among them “the Socialist candidate for president of the United States.”

Franklin Roosevelt, says Levin, “had a war against the press.” He established the Federal Communications Commission in 1934 and reduced the length of broadcast radio licenses from three years to six months to make sure they “abide(d) by the policies of the government.”

Levin notes FDR “appointed a political confidant to run the IRS. He would order this director to conduct audits on political opponents and newspaper publishers.” He also “ordered the IRS to lay off a young congressman they were investigating (named) Lyndon Johnson.”

Want more? “At FDR’s direction,” says Levin, “Senate Democrats subpoenaed tens of thousands of telegrams from Western Union because they… thought it was run by Republicans.”

President Kennedy, says Levin, “appointed a loyalist to be IRS Commissioner and he would routinely read tax filings of political opponents, people…who were wealthy…for the fun of it…and leak(ed) to Ben Bradley,” who wrote for Newsweek magazine and later became editor at The Washington Post.

Lyndon Johnson, says Levin, “used the IRS, the FBI, the CIA…and went after his political opponents, businesses, publishers. He spied on the Goldwater campaign and had bugs by the FBI placed in the Goldwater headquarters.” Johnson also ordered the phones of Martin Luther King Jr. and other Black civil rights leaders to be bugged

Barack Obama, about whom so many say was free of scandal, had his Justice Department subpoena and seize “20 Associated Press phone lines used by 100 reporters,” says Levin, “and communications between reporters and the CIA.”

Levin chronicled so many more actions ordered by mostly Democrat presidents that taken together, or individually, pale in comparison to President Trump’s efforts to uphold the law. Levin calls Democrats the real authoritarians. “They’re the ones who reject the outcomes of elections…they’re the ones who seek to change the citizenry of this country because they don’t much like the way that we vote and that way they can pick up more congressional seats…And if they can’t let’s get rid of the Electoral College so only the 11 or 12 most populous states, almost all of which are Democrat, (will) control the country, and we’ll call it democracy.”

Probably no history teacher, if they get around to the subject, calls any of those former presidents or today’s Democrat party “dictators.”

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Readers may email Cal Thomas at tcaeditors@tribpub.com. Look for Cal Thomas’ latest book “A Watchman in the Night: What I've Seen Over 50 Years Reporting on America" (HumanixBooks).