Ike couldn’t have done more damage if he had served as a Democrat, and probably given the GOP a fighting chance to not have ended up as a permanent minority party for the better part of 6 decades.
...........
I would have laid that at the feet of Nixon who made mortal enemies on the left while being himself something of a leftist.
Nixon was a liberal Republican, though anti-Communist (back when one could be such a thing). It was only because he was the latter that he was mistakenly labeled as being a “Conservative” (when liberals became less and less interested in fighting the Communist threat after the 1950s).
Unfortunately, during the 20 years of FDR/Truman, the GOP became transformed into a Democrat/Socialist-lite party, presuming the American public was happy with a larger, more activist federal government, instead of the Harding-Coolidge small government of the 1920s, which was arguably the greatest economic success in the past century (although falsely smeared by the left as having precipitated the Great Depression, which began under the left-leaning Hoover and exacerbated under an even more leftist FDR, whom ironically ran to Hoover’s RIGHT in 1932 in preaching a more austere method to deal with the problems. Ironically, had FDR followed his campaign rhetoric, he probably would’ve wrapped up the depression before the end of his first term).