No, they are far more extreme than they were before.

The extremist rhetoric you’re hearing today was echoed during the Bush Unitary Executive era and was arguably even worse during the Reagan and Nixon eras, when the then-President was significantly more popular.

it’s absolutely true that they are worse than before (republicans).

They’re less popular than before, so the fascist policies Americans used to nod and smile at during the War on Drugs or the War on Terror are no longer going down so smoothly. And we’ve had nearly half a century of ramp up. So police brutality was more remarkable during Rodney King, when a few city cops could bludgeon a guy on camera, than in the modern day when the NYPD can merc a guy and two other civilians in the subway over bus fare.

But the policies? The rhetoric? The machismo attitude? The bigotries? Its the same shit. In many cases, its the same people. John Bolton was literally a Reagan guy who had served in every GOP administration up to Trump. Elliott Abrams was directly implicated in Iran-Contra. Rumsfeld and Cheney were cronies under Gerald Ford, ffs. They were doing all the same bloody-fisted international brutality and signing off on all the domestic immigrant hunting and domestic fear-mongering that we’ve seen under Trump.

Trump’s judicial appoints are the same Federalist Society hacks that crawled up through the bowls of the prior administrations. His cabinet is stacked with Reagan and Bush Era state level officials. Pence was a Reagan Republican and a Rush-style reactionary talk radio host who worked at the same “Alliance Defending Freedom” right-wing legal lawsuit mills as House Speaker Mike Johnson and SCOTUS judge Amy Comey Barret and Trump AGs William Barr and Jeff Sessions and Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. A 31 year old institution founded by James Dobson, an arch-conservative Christian Fundamentalist.

This is who they have always been.