It's not a direct equivalency, but this is hardly the first administration to conduct blatant misuse of the government apparatus for political ends. President Obama's administration played pretty fast and loose with the NSA, the IRS, and the DoJ, for example, and the equivalency stems from these all being examples of abuse of governmental authority for political ends - in some cases, in direct violation of the government charter.
The unwillingness of the left to pick up that particular complaint is what allows this administration to make such an obviously political request for an abuse of their own. You see, the precedent has been set.
I was listening to a podcast with Zeynep Tufekci where she outlined - to the Obama Administration, in the full swing of a campaign - how their reliance on social-media style hypertargeting is actually quite a dangerous tool. The response she got from campaign officials was a brusque pushback: the "other side" doesn't like science and data like "our side" does, therefore this tool will only be usable by "the good guys". And then the 2016 election season saw everyone using the same techniques, as warned. The surveillance state exists, and is getting stronger. This latest overstep by the Trump administration is further proof of the worsening problem.
But Trump certainly didn't invent the tactic, nor is he redefining the extent of Executive overreach. Continuing to remain blind to this is agreeing to be part of the continued problem. If you can't separate the partisan angle from this problem, then you are part of the in-group/out-group division that allows such transgressions to not only continue, but to get worse over time. Let me restate my argument here, for clarity's sake: this request by the Trump Administration is wrong, but only deciding to complain about this kind of stuff because it's Trump doing it is enabling Trump to get away with it. Claiming the non-equivalence of what he is doing now is easily dismissable as partisan bias and will serve to only steer the conversation into distraction.
Tell me, who do you think benefits the most from the distraction?