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If any other Republican nominee had beat Clinton, they would have been hated, as Obama was, as Bush was, and perhaps even more due to social media turning up the temperature. But I think it's unlikely they would have been impeached or criminally indicted.
Maybe! There were efforts to impeach Bush; probably depending on what you count as "efforts" there have been at least some efforts to impeach many U.S. presidents. I still see occasional digs from the American Left to the effect of "here's your periodic reminder that Bush and Cheney are guilty of war crimes and should be in prison." So what gets us across the threshold of "generic anti-opposition talk" to "concrete action," at this point?
The threshold does seem to be lower, now. It seems to me that, compared to 30 or 40 years ago, we spend a lot less time talking about what would actually be good for the country, policy-wise, and a lot more time insisting that the opposition's plans are actually illegal, that the opposition belongs in jail, etc. Trump certainly played his own part in that ("lock her up!") but he backed away from it after election. We're now more than halfway through his successor's first term and Democrats in power in New York (not coincidentally, I think, the state that elected Hillary Clinton as Senator!) are actually carrying through efforts to jail Trump on what so far appear to be exaggerated charges. Can a kangaroo court be far behind?
Watching the news media take shots at DeSantis in advance of his anticipated run at the White House, with headlines like "Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is a Far More Dangerous Politician than Donald Trump" is interesting. Discussions of a national divorce are also not entirely novel in American political history. My worry is that the Left, which has for most of the 21st century been warning America of encroaching fascism, has decided to beat its opponents to the punch on the matter.
"Trumped-up charges" is looking to become the most consequential case of nominative determinism in American history.
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I mean, I highly doubt Marco Rubio would've tried to pay off porn stars, talk the governor of Georgia into finding some votes, or instigating an insurrection after he narrowly lost Arizona in 2020.
Why do you doubt it? Paying off hookers is probably the most archetypical thing a politician could do (and that's when they're being nice), and BLM shows insurrections are pretty common.
If anything, this shows Trump must really be quite clean, if this is all they can throw at him.
After all, he was a real estate developer in New York in the 1970s and 80s. I would have expected way worse.
Either he's super clean or the real charges would implicate people that no New York prosecutor wants to implicate.
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It does feel like Trump might have been one of the first modern candidates that had a seething hatred aimed at him from both the base and the DC political class of the opposite party. Bush and Obama seemed hated by the bases, but it didn't seem like it was anything more than "well, your turn to lead for now and we'll be the opposition" other than that.
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