In his new piece, Glenn Greenwald eloquently expresses much about Trump and peoples' reaction to him that I always thought as well:

No Matter the Liberal Metric Chosen, the Bush/Cheney Administration Was Far Worse Than Trump

It should go without saying, though I know it does not, that none of this is a defense of these Trump failings or an attempt to mitigate the harms they caused. What this argument is, instead, is a vehement rejection of the grotesque historical revisionism that seeks to erase and whitewash the far worse moral evils, acts of violence and assertions of lawlessness that preceded him, all in order to propagate myths of American Exceptionalism and, worse, to rehabilitate the reputations and careers of the political and media cretins who perpetrated them.

Those who want to insist that Trump’s evils are unprecedented – such that their own service to or support for prior presidents should not exclude them from the realm of the Patriotic, the Decent and the Noble – should be prepared to explain which acts of Trump’s compete with the destruction of Iraq, or the implementation of a global regime of torture, or the “rendition” kidnappings and CIA black sites and illegal domestic eavesdropping under Bush and Obama, or imprisoning people for decades with no due process, and on and on and on.