Something I've heard a lot from liberals recently is that Donald Trump is a new breed of Republican. That they've been able to agree to disagree with past Republicans but Donald Trump is different.

Quite frankly, I don't understand this thought process at all. Yes, Donald Trump is unprecedented in many ways, but if you actually look at history, the Republicans of the past have quite a lot of blood on their hands.

The main Republican liberals like to point to conservative hero Ronald Reagan, as someone they could agree to disagree with. But if you actually look at what Reagan did, he certainly isn't someone whose "differences in opinion" we should respect.

He started the war on drugs which overwhelmingly targeted black people. Many of the problems related to mass incarceration today can be directly traced back to his presidency. Reagan was also, on record, against every single piece of legislation from the civil rights era.

He ignored the AIDS crisis, a disease that completely decimated the LGBTQ+ community, for years. Members of his administration are on tape literally laughing about AIDS just as LGBTQ+ people were dying by the hundreds of thousands. Reagan's lack of response to the AIDS crisis is the primary reason why there are so little queer elders today.

He cut federal funding to multiple social services provided to low-income people. This lead to a crisis of homelessness that the US still hasn't recovered from.

That's just his domestic policy. On an international level, he directly supported a genocide in Guatemala. He even went so far to have the FBI intimidate and harass Central American activists.

He also continued to support the apartheid regime in South Africa even when many Republicans were in favor of sanctions. In his mind, he wanted South Africa as an ally, so the racist regime did not bother him.

This is certainly not all Reagan did during his presidency. And his Republican successors certainly lived up to his legacy.

George H.W. Bush won the 1988 election by blatantly exploiting fears of black criminality. His son invaded a sovereign country under false pretenses.

Yes, Donald Trump is probably worse than all three of them, which is a very terrifying thought. But let's not pretend that men like Reagan were good people we just had some disagreements with. Their policies were incredibly destructive and we are still dealing with many of the consequences today.

The difference was, unlike Trump, they knew how to hide their bigotry.