Your comparison misses the issue of scale. When you combine decades of scandals and compare them to a single year, it can make things look equivalent when it is nowhere near the same. To me, it’s less about whether actions were public or hidden, and more about how often they occur. Historically, major controversies happened occasionally, now they are constant.
Neither party has a spotless record. There have been anti-democratic or troubling actions across the political spectrum, look at the LWV removal from the debates, look at what the Dems did to yank Bernie in 2016. None of that is democracy. Democrats in the past have been racist, look at LBJ or even early Joe Biden. It’s easy to notice faults more readily in the side we oppose.
My view is that the current situation represents a meaningful escalation rather than just “more of the same.” Framing it as equivalent risks minimizing extreme differences that matter. I have never been worried that any of those prior presidents could end our democratic republic. That is a current concern. You will not be able to frame this in a way that makes them seem the same to me.
As a thought experiment: if you could choose the current president from Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Nixon, or Trump, would you just say "Meh, all the same. No need to raise the dead, we might as well stick with Trump." I would not. I don't believe those men, despite their flaws, were authoritarian bigots like Trump. And that’s why I don’t view the present moment as typical conservative politics.
