Charlie Cook: “It is interesting to look at the results of the 25 presidential elections over the last 100 years, starting with Herbert Hoover’s 1928 victory over Al Smith. Ten of the 25 elections (40 percent) produced landslide victories—margins of 10 points or more. The most recent of these, however, was Ronald Reagan’s 49-state, 18-point victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. To put it differently, landslides occurred in 10 of the first 15 elections in this 100-year span; we now have had 10 consecutive elections without one.”

“A landslide presidential election is a clear, unambiguous, indisputable statement by the American people about what and whom they want, and about what and whom they have rejected. This clarity is useful, albeit quite painful for the losing candidate and party. A lack of landslides means that voters are not giving clear guidance on the direction that the country should go or what kind of leaders they want.”

David Brooks: “Maybe you’ve seen photos of Tehran in the 1970s, just before the Islamic Revolution: images of young women going to work in miniskirts, of couples making out in parks while wearing bell-bottoms, of people at pools in bikinis. It looks like Paris or Milan or Los Angeles. But in 1979 the revolution happened, and now Tehran looks like something from an earlier century.”

“Sometimes I think that our whole world has become kind of like that—going backwards in time. The religious movements thriving in today’s secularized age are the traditionalist ones that dissent from large parts of contemporary culture—not only the Shiite Islam of post-revolution Iran, but Orthodox Judaism and conservative Catholicism. Young Americans are flooding into Eastern Orthodox churches.”

“Many of us thought that the world would get more democratic as it modernized, but for the past quarter century, we have seen a reversion to authoritarian strongmen.”

“The framers had no concept of nuclear weapons and what a president could do with them. And I don’t think they ever anticipated that somebody would act in the ways that Donald Trump has been acting in office.”

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), in an interview with Time.

Janan Ganesh looks at the origins of the “madman theory” of diplomacy during the Nixon administration and notes “there are reasons to think the ploy will be even less successful now than it was then.”

“For one thing, Nixon made his threats through private channels. If he decided to back down from them, he would not lose face in front of the entire world. In contrast, Trump’s threats to erase a civilization could scarcely be more public. The pressure to make good on them at some point is correspondingly higher. It might intensify after his agreement to a conditional ceasefire with Iran on Taco Tuesday — sorry, April 7. This is why games of bluff are better played behind closed doors.”

“Another difference is that mid-20th century Vietnam was not central to the world economy. Early-21st century Iran unmistakably is.”

Los Angeles Times: “It took three decades of battles and lobbying for Cesar Chavez’s name and likeness to grace hundreds of buildings, roads, parks and schools.”

“It is taking just days for them to come down.”

“In the two days after allegations emerged that the famed farmworker rights leader and Chicano figure sexually assaulted minors and fellow labor icon Dolores Huerta, Chavez is being erased at an unprecedented rate. This is especially true in California, where his fight for agricultural workers’ rights was cemented in state history.”

New York Times: Public references to Cesar Chavez are being removed across the U.S.

The New York Times found extensive evidence that the United Farm Workers co-founder groomed and sexually abused girls who worked in the movement.

“The Trump administration’s campaign to remove National Park Service exhibits that ‘inappropriately disparage’ historical figures is bogged down more than nine months after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum set it in motion,” Politico reports.

“Many park personnel on the ground now are unsure if NPS will soon demand changes at many parks or leave things as they are, said a park superintendent… The effort has reached a ‘nebulous’ phase, the superintendent said, with some parks moving forward with edits and others still waiting for changes to be approved.”

John Judis: “Trump himself may soon be disgraced, but he and his administration have set in motion long-term changes that are going to be with us for the foreseeable future. Trump, it is increasingly clear, is a figure of enormous historical significance who is reshaping America and the globe in ways that will not easily be undone by Democratic wins in future elections.”

“Liberals, naturally, would like to believe the opposite: that once they triumph at the ballot box, all can go back to normal…”

“This could not be more wrong. And the ill-conceived but also era-defining war in Iran — the seventh country that Trump has attacked in his second term — is just the latest manifestation of how Trump is irrevocably changing our world.”

Charleston Post & Courier: “Alvin Greene, who went from political obscurity to becoming a S.C. Democratic Party folk hero by walking off the street and winning the party’s 2010 U.S. Senate nomination before disappearing back into obscurity, has died. He was 48.”

Founding father and slave owner Caesar Rodney, “whose statue in Delaware was removed in 2020 amid calls for racial reckoning, will be given a position in honor in Washington by the Trump administration as part of celebrations of the nation’s 250th birthday,” the New York Times reports.

“The Rev. Jesse Jackson, whose impassioned oratory and populist vision of a “rainbow coalition” of the poor and forgotten made him the nation’s most influential Black figure in the years between the civil rights crusades of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the election of Barack Obama, died on Tuesday. He was 84,” the New York Times reports.

“Mr. Jackson picked up the mantle of Dr. King after his assassination in 1968 and ran for president twice, long before Mr. Obama’s election in 2008. But he never achieved either the commanding moral stature of Dr. King or the ultimate political triumph attained by Mr. Obama.”

Washington Post: “Rev. Jackson’s oratorical style, like the civil rights movement, was rooted in the Black churches of the South. He would begin slowly, in an almost conversational tone, and gradually build to a crescendo that left some listeners in tears.”