There was no equivalent argument, in terms of evidence, made against Hillary. Regardless with Trump, what we have are at least these things:
- He's on record calling for Russia, a foreign nuclear adversary, to hack Hillary's emails and release them to benefit him, at a time when they were doing JUST THAT. Was it a freudian slip of some kind, letting the world know that he knew what was going on? It's really too much to assume it's just coincidence with what we know now about the massive campaign Russia was knee deep in at that point.
- His son is on record saying "Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets. We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia." For years, his business has had strong ties with Russia. Not china, not mexico, not any other country...but Russia.
- He has NO BAD THING to say about Putin, ever. This isn't hyperbole...not only does he not say bad things, he praises the man. When pressed, he doesn't do it. It's uncanny...it's as if he's been cursed to utter not a negative thing about Putin or Russia and he's stuck to it perfectly. Even if this was all there was, this would be very odd.
- The Financial Times, a reputable and respected organization, is finding links between his business and bad folks in Russia. The investigation seems to just be gearing up, so we'll see what happens here, but it's not terribly surprising as it'd be a strong motivation behind not releasing his tax returns.
- The freaking Intelligence Community put out a report saying they had high confidence that Russia was engaged in an effort to smear Hillary and get Trump elected. They have high confidence Russia, approved/guided by putin, was engaged in a propaganda dissemination campaign that had a goal to get Trump elected. Our president was helped along to win the presidency by a foreign power who he will say nothing bad about, whom he has business ties with, who the IC says helped him along...no smoke yet? Let's keep going.
- Paul Manafort, Trumps former campaign manager, is under investigation by the FBI for ties to Russia. Other folks on his team, and his cabinet nominees, many have unusually close relationships to Putin and Russia in general. Odd on its own, concerning in context of everything else.
- When the Intelligence Community was releasing information implicating Russia, instead of Trump accepting the information like any sane human would do, he lashed out at the Intelligence Community rather than accept that Russia was behind the hacking. Since the briefing, he still refuses to directly meet this question head on as he's not willing to discuss it anymore. He has a major problem being willing to admit that Russia was behind the hacking and they were working to get him elected.
- The tactics that Trump used to become president, to win the election, bear a striking resemblance to the methods Putin is using to discredit democracies across the world. Undermine confidence in elections (Trump: The system is rigged) and cast doubt on the outcomes. Discredit the traditional sources of truth in a country, specifically the media and the intelligence community, both of which he's targeted, with journalists being someone he's targeted repeatedly and brutally. And regarding propaganda, many times in the campaign, his rhetoric and information mirrored what the Russian media was putting out.
What's odd here is that politics as normal has been so disrupted, that we don't even have our frame of reference anymore that ANY SINGLE ONE OF THESE THINGS being true in previous years would've been a scandal of epic proportions. Yet, you pile them all together with Trump, and people want to give him the benefit of the doubt. "Just wait to see what he does"...but good lord, he went on a multi-year defamation expedition on Obama about his birth certificate with about 1/10000000th of the evidence of probable cause as I just laid out above. This isn't similar to anything that could be factually said about his opponent during the campaign. The difference in scale, and the legitimacy of the information, are worlds apart. Almost everything I said above is based on highly reputable sources, aside from my editorializing.
There is a ton of smoke, and it's silly to say we should just sit back, give the man the benefit of the doubt, and wait and see. He is not normal, this is not a normal president-elect, the situations described above individually are very concerning, but when added together paint a very concerning picture. And what's more, I'm not including everything I could be...just the most solid, well known stuff. We're still only a couple months out from him winning the election and investigations take time...there's every reason to believe there's more to this story. I am not a conspiracy theorist, and most of the time scoff at loose conspiracies even if they're focused on people I don't like...but this seems much more real.