Pence is running against his old boss. The last VP to try that bombed.

The vice president of the United States was running against the president he was serving under, and his backers didn’t mince words. They accused the president of having a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

The president’s backers fired back, warning that if the vice president won the election, “Murder, robbery, rape, adultery, and incest will be openly taught and practiced.”

That vice president, Thomas Jefferson, had once been friends with President John Adams before their 1800 campaign. But the two Founding Fathers had a nasty falling-out — like former vice president Mike Pence did with his now-opponent for the 2024 Republican nomination, former president Donald Trump.

Pence, whose super PAC called Trump “an apologist for thugs and dictators” in a recent ad, is the third veep to run against his former boss and the first since a disastrous challenge in 1940.

Jefferson had become vice president because he had finished second to Adams in 1796, in America’s first contested presidential election. The Sage of Monticello differed with Adams’s policies, especially on the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts that made it illegal to criticize the government. In 1800, neither man campaigned personally but spread their views instead through partisan newspapers and pamphlets.

John Adams, who won in 1796, made it illegal to criticize his office. (Library of Congress)

Thomas Jefferson paid a journalist to attack Adams through the press. (Library of Congress)

Jeffersonians charged that Federalist Adams was “a monarchist” who had become cozy with the British. Newspapers referred to the portly president as “His Rotundity.” Long before Twitter, Jefferson backers spread a conspiracy theory that Adams planned to create a family dynasty by having one of his sons marry one of King George III’s daughters. The secret plot, according to the story, was thwarted when George Washington himself, dressed in his Revolutionary War uniform, “had drawn his sword and threatened to run the president through,” Ralph A. Brown wrote in “The Presidency of John Adams.”

Jefferson paid journalist James Callender to attack Adams in print. Callender, who was out for revenge after being sentenced to prison for violating the Sedition Acts, wrote that “the reign of Mr. Adams has, hitherto, been one of continued tempest of malignant passions.” He wrote a false story that Adams wanted to invade France in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Jefferson’s party also obtained and leaked to the press a private letter by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton saying Adams had “great and intrinsic defects in his character.”

Federalist newspapers attacked Jefferson in response, accusing him of dodging military service during the Revolutionary War. They called him a “howling atheist” who had become a libertine while serving as U.S. ambassador to France. Yale College president and theologian Timothy Dwight warned that Jefferson would make “our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.”

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