And in comparison to previous republicans, the difference is two-fold. First, the government has been affected by the same politicization of the workplace that’s happened in corporate America over the last decade.
Second, previous republicans are aligned with neoliberal democrats on certain key cultural issues. Reagan publicly opposed affirmative action, but his government kept implementing and expanding it. Reagan and Bush supported immigration and Reagan granted amnesty. Highly educated democrats were willing to play along with certain issues, but see Trump’s issues as fundamentally moral ones. E.g. Even today, there is almost no partisan politics within the FCC. The career folks will happily go back and forth on net neutrality all day long. Nobody sees it as a moral imperative the way they see immigration.