What were republicans like before Trump? TLDR at the bottom

I was 2 years old when W Bush was reelected in 2004, so I never paid much attention to politics obviously. Hell, I’m sure that even when I was 6 I probably didn’t know Obama was president for a long while. But I knew he was president as some point and obviously he’s amazing

But 2016 rolls around and Donald Trump comes into the picture. I was rooting for Hilary, but ultimately at that point in my life, it didn’t affect me that much so him winning was not a big deal. And tbh I don’t even know when I started to get into politics, because I voted for Biden in 2020 but that year was such a blur that I don’t even know how I felt.

But I think it must start in 2022 when the Supreme Court overturned Roe V Wade. I looked into what caused it, and found out it was trump and his justice picks. That’s when it really started. I began looking briefly at some of his campaign in 2016 and just seeing the lying, pretentious, pos he really is.

But I ultimately didn’t pay that much attention. I figured if Biden won once, then he could win again. But we all know how that turned out.

I was so excited to see Kamala Harris running. I truly believed Trump’s cult was dying out, evident by his loss in 2020, that there was no way he’d win. This election would be a slam dunk and a retribution of the 2016 election. So for all 107 days of her campaign as well as every day since, I’ve kept a close eye on the him, with each new rally and piece of misinformation further cementing my hatred of him and his dumbass followers

The fucking insult to injury is that he doesn’t even fucking campaign. He talks about literally nothing for hours and people eat it up. In a normal world his campaign would’ve ended so many times. Need I remind you that this made jacked off a microphone and pretended to suck it? Fucking hell.

I’ve never gotten to experience it because literally 76 million people voted for him and all of them are usually batshit crazy.

Because it seems like from an ideological standpoint no republican or democrat should ever get along? But the two party system is apparently so integral to the backbone of the country that we just have to push against each other for eternity?

So TLDR: now that I’m making the effort to remain informed for probably the rest of my life, I have to know, what were republicans like in the first 15 years of the new Millennium?