Opinion: When Donald Trump cites history, watch out

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

51% : His former White House chief of staff, retired Gen. John F. Kelly, is now recorded confirming that Trump, as president, expressed admiration for Hitler.
49% : On Monday in Greenville, N.C., Trump sounded so pleased with himself to be citing a 226-year-old law, as if he were a student of history instead of a revisionist poser: "Think of that, 1798.
44% : When Trump frequently boasts that as president he'll settle Russia's war against Ukraine in a day (even Russia's ambassador to the U.N. refutes him), he calls to mind British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's "peace for our time" gambit -- his appeasement of Hitler by allowing Germany to seize a hunk of Czechoslovakia.
43% : "Unlike so many of his predecessors, Trump doesn't read histories and biographies; he's said so.
33% : Not since the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which by the consensus of historians and economists exacerbated the Great Depression, has a presidential aspirant proposed such high across-the-board tariffs on imports as Trump does.
25% : To thwart these supposed threats, which he calls more dangerous than Russia, China or Iran, Trump suggests he'd sic the National Guard or military on them.
23% : Is that what Trump would have condoned?
20% : Then there's his repeated talk of "the enemy from within," by which Trump explicitly means his Democratic enemies, "radical left lunatics."
20% : Trump learned from one of the worst.
4% : That sounds like a good thing to Trump, of course, but the backlash two centuries ago helped Thomas Jefferson defeat President John Adams in 1800.Presidents Madison, Franklin Roosevelt and Truman invoked the Alien Enemies Act in wartime.

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