It’s Bush that has caused the mess in the GOP that Donald is trying to clean up.
In all fairness, the mess goes back very far. In Eisenhower and Nixon’s day they were the “Country Club Republicans”; before then they were the Coolidge Republicans.
The first conservative revolt against them was under Goldwater. The establishment hated him because he was an honest man with money, so they could neither blackmail nor bribe him.
They insisted that if he won there would be nuclear war, but the truth is that he would have decisively ended the New Deal, broken the Democrat’s stranglehold on the South, and made the US economy both much stronger yet independent of international influences.