This is barely an answer, it's a polemic opinion piece against a specific politician and his supporters

@BlackThorn: Please identify specific individual statements of opinion so that I can remove or reword them. This answer is intended to be entirely factual.

For starters: Trump campaign crossed a line, politicians and candidates did not use words such as, the political sphere is still not sure how to respond are all either straight up opinion or unsubstantiated and easily refuted claims. The issue is that they are the core of your answer.

@BlackThorn If you believe that such kinds of attacks coming directly from a campaign were commonplace before Trump, feel free to provide any evidence of it. An answer arguing for why this approach is a continuation of past strategies would be very interesting, if you could write one.

@BlackThorn: It is obviously impossible for me to provide citations for what the media and politicians did not do pre-2016.

@divibisan politicians have been "crossing the line" with their attack ads since John Adams. One in fairly recent memory, LBJ very directly implied that cute American toddlers would die in a nuclear holocaust if people voted for Barry Goldwater. youtube.com/watch?v=in6DfFfVolM If you want to find more examples, even just on television (for which the history is not super long), there are plenty of examples of all sorts of name calling. livingroomcandidate.org/commercials/2016

@BlackThorn: My answer already covers the "shallow and specious" political issues such as the LBJ ad you link to. I'm sorry, but I just don't see anything I can reasonably change here.

My point was that all sorts of slander have been slung between candidates in presidential bids. In a very short time, I do have a hard time finding specific video examples, mainly because the web results are full of Trump news. However, it is easy to find examples of past presidential hopefuls insulting their opponent's intelligence. Horace Greeley famously called his opponent Pot-bellied, mutton-headed, cucumber-soled.

@BlackThorn Horace Greeley wasn't anywhere even close to a presidential hopeful when he said this in 1848. The 1848 election was between Zachary Taylor and Lewis Cass (for the record, he was insulting Cass). Greeley was, at the time, editor of the New York Tribune. He wouldn't run for president until 1872, against Ulysses S. Grant.

@BlackThorn Also, the fact that you have to go back to before the Civil War to find a famous example (that, it turns out, isn't even an example of the thing you're claiming) is saying something in and of itself.

There is a curated list of the often derogatory nicknames used by Trump here.

@BlackThorn, in addition to probably_someone's point about the Civil War example, the Goldwater example, while certainly pretty extreme, was still pointing ate policy and governing competency and not taking shots at mental function or just casting out insults.

@probably_someone you are right, the Greenley example wasn't a good one. I still find it odd that you all seem to believe that no presidential campaign in American history has slandered their opponent before Trump. Yes, Trump is a glowing example of name-calling, and typically presidential candidates prefer euphemisms over direct insults, but let's not forget that Hillary Clinton on multiple occasions referred to half of Trump supports as deplorable, racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic and implied that Trump, too, was guilty of all of those things.

Also, 1988 Bush campaign aired an ad that didn't directly say Dukakis, was an idiot, but lampooned him with a video of him driving a tank, inserting grinding gear sounds as if Dukakis was such a fool that he couldn't even shift the gears of a tank or something. Reagan said look, I'm not going to pick on an invalid when asked if Dukakis should release his medical records after rumors of mental problems started. dailymail.co.uk/video/news/video-1280315/…

cbsnews.com/news/who-says-political-attacks-have-gotten-wors‌​e

"For now, Biden is running a "return to normalcy" campaign." Thing is, so is Trump! They just have different examples they point to of abnormalities that need to be undone.

@BlackThorn Where did I claim that "no presidential campaign in American history has slandered their opponent before Trump"? I don't see where I said that. The only thing people are saying is that the slander that Trump and his campaign are throwing around crosses a line. Its frequency and general nastiness is on a different level than we've seen in a long time. Pretending that the situation now is the same as previous elections just because you can find one or two examples of when slander has happened before is pretty egregious false equivalence.