Yeah that party really has had no real leadership for ages. Just one "strong man" showed up and they were happy to push out any remnant of critical thinking and they're just empty suits.

Every traditional Republican ideology is now upside down / been violated with gusto.

They're a whole new party in many ways.

If you've talked to many "real American" Republican voters, Trump is exactly what they've wanted since at least the 90s. "Traditional" Republicans were just all they had as an alternative to Democrats, who are obviously going to make your kids gay and take all your guns and impose sharia law and implement communism, so you can't conceivably vote for one of them.

What's new is someone had the money and platform and good idea to leverage that huge gap between what Republican voters wanted, and the Republican platform, to judo-flip and pin the whole official party apparatus in the span of a couple years. Republicans, the voters, didn't change, or if they did, it was years and years before Trump.