Michelle Berenfeld: “In about 80 years, roughly the same length of time between the end of World War II and now, the Roman Republic was transformed into a dictatorship. If you had told a Roman senator at the beginning of the first century B.C.E. that his grandchildren would willingly hand over governance to a monarch, he would not have believed you. Like the American one, the Roman Republic was founded on the rejection of a king. Rome had a representative government that, though flawed, was based on the rule of law, with freedom of speech and rights to legal recourse for its citizens.”

“The Roman Republic lasted nearly 500 years, about twice as long as Americans have had theirs. As was surely true for the Romans, most Americans can hardly imagine that their system of self-government might break and be replaced by an imperial dynasty. That is why considering what undid the Roman Republic is useful today—if we can learn from the Romans’ mistakes.”

“If there’s a mirror image opposite to Donald Trump’s second-term blitz, it’s Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose first 100 days in office is the model for presidents who want to get things done,” CNN reports.

“The only president to serve more than two terms, Roosevelt remade government, used his bully pulpit and realigned political coalitions, all things Trump sees himself doing.”

“Trump, working with Elon Musk, wants to re-define Americans’ relationship with government by firing federal workers, dismantling long-functioning agencies, and branding as much government spending as possible as wasteful. He’s also realigning global trade and reworking international alliances as quickly as possible.”

Jonathan Last: “We cannot overstate what has just happened. It took just 71 days for Donald Trump to wreck the American economy, mortally wound NATO, and destroy the American-led world order.”

“He did this with the enthusiastic support of the entire Republican party and conservative movement.”

“He did it with the support of a plurality of American voters.”

“He did not hide his intentions. He campaigned on them. He made them the central thrust of his election. He told Americans that he would betray our allies and give up our leadership position in the world.”

Timothy Ryback: “One of the greatest journalistic misapprehensions of all time was made by one of the greatest journalists of all time. In December 1931, the legendary American reporter Dorothy Thompson secured an interview with Adolf Hitler, whose National Socialist party had recently surged in the polls, bringing him from the fringe of German politics to the cusp of political power.”

Recalled Thomson later: “When I walked into Adolf Hitler’s room, I was convinced that I was meeting the future dictator of Germany. In something like 50 seconds, I was quite sure he was not. It took just about that time to measure the startling insignificance of this man who has set the world agog.”

“Within a year, Hitler was chancellor.”

“We have come to view Hitler’s path to the chancellorship, and ultimately to dictatorship, as inexorable, and Hitler himself as a demonic force of human nature who defied every law of political gravity—not as the man of ‘startling insignificance’ Thompson encountered in the second-floor corner office of the Brown House, the Nazi Party headquarters in Munich, that day. But Thompson was hardly alone in her assessment. Much of the German press, most international correspondents, and many political observers—along with a majority of ordinary Germans—drew similar conclusions about the Nazi leader.”

“For years, as the government has declassified and published documents related — some very tenuously — to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the assumption expressed by conspiracy theorists and some historians was that anything still being withheld could be big,” the New York Times reports.

“That assumption led some of President Trump’s allies, including Kennedy’s nephew, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is now the nation’s top health official, to push him to release the final tranche of files from the Kennedy archives, believing they might reveal damning evidence: namely, that Kennedy was not assassinated by a lone gunman in Dallas.”

“But with the release of nearly 64,000 pages by the National Archives over the past 24 hours, including some that previously included redactions, it is becoming clear that something else might have been behind the secrecy: protecting the sources and occasionally unsavory practices of U.S. intelligence operations.”

“President Trump’s national security team was stunned and forced to scramble after he announced on Monday that he would release 80,000 pages of documents related to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy with only 24 hours’ notice,” the New York Times reports.

“Administration officials had been working on releasing the records since January, when Mr. Trump signed an executive order mandating it. But that process was still underway on Monday afternoon when Mr. Trump, during a visit to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, said the files would be made available the next day.”

“By the time the files were made public on Tuesday evening, some of the country’s top national security officials had spent hours trying to assess any possible security hazards under extreme deadline pressure.”

President Trump announced he will release 80,000 pages of unredacted files Tuesday about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, after promising on the campaign trail to declassify the documents, The Hill reports.

Said Trump to reporters: “You got a lot of reading. I don’t believe we’re going to redact anything.”

Don Moynihan: “Right now, the federal government is engaged in a dramatic purging of visual representations of American history and its current workforce. Some of this is a Stalinist removal of former officials. The official portraits of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, and Trump Secretary of Defense Mark Esper are gone. An NIH mural featuring Anthony Fauci was removed.”

“More systematically, it also the removal of women, persons of color, and trans people, following executive orders around DEI and gender. Here, the removals signal the end one form of representation that valued inclusiveness and a broader understanding and acknowledgment of people whose stories were not always told…”

“The Trump presidency is, as much as anything, a project of purging and erasing large parts of America, of people, ideas, capacities, and knowledge.”

Arlington National Cemetery’s website “has scrubbed dozens of pages on gravesites and educational materials that include histories of prominent Black, Hispanic and female service members buried in the cemetery, along with educational material on dozens of Medal of Honor recipients and maps of prominent gravesites,” Task & Purpose reports.

Bret Stephens: “It used to be common knowledge — not just among policymakers and economists but also high school students with a grasp of history — that tariffs are a terrible idea. The phrase ‘beggar thy neighbor’ meant something to regular people, as did the names of Senator Reed Smoot and Representative Willis Hawley. Americans broadly understood how much their 1930 tariff, along with other protectionist and isolationist measures, did to turn a global economic crisis into another world war. Thirteen successive presidents all but vowed never to repeat those mistakes.”

“Until Donald Trump. Until him, no U.S. president has been so ignorant of the lessons of history. Until him, no U.S. president has been so incompetent in putting his own ideas into practice.”

Washington Post: “A curious rhetorical and ideological struggle has been playing out on Capitol Hill and in the White House in recent weeks, as the Trump administration has sought to apply Reagan’s ‘peace through strength’ mantra to the president’s unprecedented break with traditional U.S. allies and embrace of longtime adversary Russia.”

“Critics, including GOP centrists, have worried about the corruption of a long-held foreign policy doctrine while Democrats increasingly find themselves waxing nostalgic for a Republican president from the 1980s.”

“Richard Nixon was a different kind of a guy, and he was a tough cookie, and he was very smart. People don’t realize how smart he was, but he made one bad decision. He didn’t fight. I spoke to his family. They say he regretted that until the day he died. He didn’t fight.”

— President Trump, in an interview with The Spectator.