In the 1990s he said he was very pro-choice. That's changed.

In some more fundamental sense, you are right - he hasn't changed that much. Doonesbury, 16 September 1987 characterized him as "I'm just a billionaire developer exercising trial balloons! If I were running [for President] though, it'd be as an original, as a beloved archetype - the American Landlord!" https://readingdoonesbury.com/2018/06/01/selling-reagan-to-b...

You couldn't have read Doonesbury at the time without knowing that a lot of people didn't like Trump, but did things for him because of his money.

Certainly some people did like him. Some of those trial balloons went over really well with racists, like the malicious Central Park 5 ad. ("even a fool can become a multi-millionaire." and 'Trump "was the fire starter" in 1989, as "common citizens were being manipulated and swayed into believing that we were guilty."' - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Park_jogger_case ).

As one of the examples of how we know a lot of people didn't like the short fingered vulgarian, here's a 50 second piece featured in "Alive from Off Center" in 1991, starting at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HY7pKQ-Imco&t=559 and ending with the assertion that names like Donald Trump ("a man who can buy his cake and eat it too") "are just fancy names for irrelevance".

IMO what changed is the economic insecurity as the New Deal and Great Society were torn down from the rise of neoliberal thought in the 1970s, funded by rich reactionaries who want to return to a pre-New Deal America, and embraced by both major parties who are more beholden to rich donors than the electorate. As President Lyndon B. Johnson once said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." That continues to be used to redirect anger towards minorities, instead of at the rich people, and Trump, as you point out, has for decades been a master at picking that pocket.