In fact, people for the most part misremember that time. The mythology that Clinton was a disciplined compartmentalizer who kept public business rigorously insulated from his personal and legal problems, like many myths, has an element of truth. But it has an equal or greater element of fiction. Impeachment consumed a year of his public and private life, and by all evidence it is doing the same to Trump.

As long as we are indulging in fantasy, rather than pretending Trump is now emulating Clinton, it is more fun to imagine what it might have been like if Clinton had emulated Trump.

Imagine the White House releasing a transcript, as the Trump did in the Ukraine matter, of his erotically charged morning phone calls with Monica Lewinsky. Or picture Clinton striding to the South Lawn microphones to say that, yes, indeed, he had a sexual relationship with the former intern, that it was his right as commander in chief to have affairs, and that their furtive West Wing liaisons had been “perfect.”

Stretch back a little further to President Richard Nixon, who if he were channeling Trump, would not have denied responsibility for the Watergate break-in but boasted about it, would have claimed he had evidence that the Democratic National Committee was conspiring with foreign powers against his reelection, and would have demanded that Democrats be investigated for treason.

The parlor game is entertaining, but highlights a serious point: Whatever similarities exist between Trump and Clinton, they are minor compared to the differences in American political culture between the two times. Twenty-one years isn’t that long along, but in important respects it is very far away.

The biggest change is in our national capacity for shock. Many people are genuinely alarmed by Trump’s efforts to enlist Ukraine in U.S. domestic politics, but there aren’t many at this late date who are shocked—as in, can’t believe this is happening!—by his actions or statements about them.

A telling example from the earlier episode: Clinton lied about his relationship with Lewinsky for several months in 1998, from the time the story broke in January until he made a nationally televised confession in August. It is hard to recall the degree of bipartisan disapproval that thundered down on the passages in that confession when he confronted, not by name, prosecutor Kenneth Starr. The investigation into his private life, he complained, had “gone on too long, cost too much, and hurt too many innocent people.”

Even many Democratic lawmakers were aghast and outspokenly critical. How dare Clinton, at a time when he should be wallowing in contrition, instead question the legitimacy of the effort to drive him from office?

Compare Clinton’s mild words of protest with—to pick almost at random from hundreds of ready examples—Trump’s description this week of House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff. “I think he’s a maniac. Adam Schiff is a deranged human being. I think he grew up with a complex for lots of reasons that are obvious. I think he is a very sick man. And he lies.”

A country that has learned to shrug at such words from a president—who was standing next to another head of state at the time—is not the same one in which Clinton navigated his scandal. Shock is a drug whose effects have worn off.

Another example worth pondering: Clinton did indeed embrace the impropriety of his behavior, just disputed the impeachable nature of it, and Democrats were not blithely tolerant, much less supportive of it.

Few people these days seem to remember that Clinton and his agents in the fall of 1998 were virtually begging for Congress to pass a resolution of censure condemning his conduct as a way of averting impeachment. Republicans dismissed censure as a meaningless diversion, determined to use constitutional procedures to drive him from office.

By contrast, when Trump the other day was asked whether he would accept being censured, as a way of allowing Republicans to express disapproval of his Ukraine dealings while voting against impeachment and removal, he was contemptuous. “Unacceptable,” he said at a London news conference. “I did nothing wrong. You don’t censure somebody when they did nothing wrong.”

This is the profound difference between Clinton and Trump. While Clinton’s critics delighted in calling him “shameless,” the evidence is abundant that regret and self-rebuke echoed within him often during his year of impeachment.