When would Ike have switched Parties?

[RINO Tom]

Lol.  Never.  However, I do not think he would have supported Trump.

Eisenhower's reputation as some type of moderate (or even progressive!!) comes from his temperament, not his views.  In his own words and those of his former friend Harry Truman, Ike was a fairly standard conservative Republican.  He was just pragmatic, too.

[RINO Tom]

The revisionist history around Eisenhower is pretty astounding. The only reason he kept taxes high was because he was a deficit hawk which was the conservative orthodoxy at the time as opposed to supply side. Truthfully I don't think he had strong enough beliefs on anything other then foreign policy to actively switch parties and while I can see him being critical of both W and Trump I think he would still be a Republican today.

I would also like to point out that Eisenhower's famous message about the "Military-Industrial Complex" was referring to the slow-moving Kafkaesque nature of the bureaucracy in the Pentagon, not some message about war profiteering. I mean, just think about it, this is the same Eisenhower who had John Foster Dulles as his Secretary of State and the other Dulles as head of the CIA; it's fairly evident just from these two points alone (nevermind the actual actions his administration undertook) that he was not opposed to foreign intervention.

Not to mention that the interstate thing is more evidence of Ike's preference for defense spending than it is a love for economically wasteful infrastructure spending for the sake of ~supporting infrastructure spending~.

I also think a key story that says A LOT is that Eisenhower's friendship with Truman was allegedly extremely affected when Truman figured out just how partisan and conservative Ike was ... I mean, Ike told him that he voted against his friend in favor of Dewey.  Eisenhower was private, dignified and measured, so his politics seem more of a "mystery" than they probably actually were if you were to ask him views on a number of subjects, IMO.

[RINO Tom]

Am I correct in thinking that Eisenhower hated Robert Taft and helped sell the UN to Republicans?

Maybe in the sense that McConnell might hate Ted Cruz.

[RINO Tom]

He wouldn't have. Ike had a genepool Plains-German dislike and distrust of the Democratic Party; the only reason he was seen as a potential Democratic substitute candidate in 1948 was that this was not commonly known at the time. I don't agree with the idea that he wouldn't have any issue with Bush or with Trump at all, but I think he would chart a course much closer to someone like Romney or Liz Cheney than to the Lincoln Project if he were alive and politically relevant today.

Yea, I agree with this analysis, though it is hard to say just how some historical figure would react in a future environment. One thing I have been pressing back hard against lately is the underestimating of political divisions in periods of "political consensus". These always come across as down playing the divides that rose up to fill the vacuum or a generally dismissive stance towards a previous policy position because such is not well regarded by the mainstream today.

Just because a lot of Republicans were of moderate temperament and "accepting of the New Deal", doesn't mean that every Republican could have just have easily been a Democrat.

Eisenhower was not a Conservative Republican.  He intensely disliked the GOP Western and Midwestern conservatives in the party.  He hated Sen. William Knowland (R-CA) and was happy when he left the Senate to run for CA Governor in 1958 and lost.  He generally did not think much of the Republican Party in general.  His favorite politicians appear to be Southern Democratic conservatives, and he personally cultivated them.  If you look at the brain trust of the Eisenhower Administration, you will see that most of the people who were "somebody" in the Administration were very singular partisans; the only Republican they cared about was Eisenhower.

Another myth was the idea that Eisenhower would have been more dovish on Vietnam.  Despite his dislike for the Western conservatives, Eisenhower endorsed Goldwater.  One reason was that Ike was hawkish on Vietnam.  He was invited into meetings with LBJ on Vietnam in 1965 and in each of those meetings he was unreservedly hawkish and urged LBJ to go for victory.

Eisenhower, himself, was something of a racist.  He was not a Lincoln Republican on Civil Rights.  It was Eisenhower that first cracked the Solid South in 1952, carrying 5 states in the peripheral South, and it was Eisenhower that put the brakes on integration.  He was sympathetic to the South's desires for more time to integrate, although he did send troops to Little Rock.  Eisenhower was not a segregationist and did not support Jim Crow, but he was willing to advocate slowing the pace of integration in the South.  I suppose that was part of his legislative strategy; Southern Democrats controlled many key committee chairs in both Houses and Eisenhower wanted his program to get through.

In his own words, Eisenhower disliked the “conservative wing” of the GOP due to his preference for pragmatism, not due to their ideology.  Eisenhower embodies pragmatic (rather than rabid/ideologue) conservatism perfectly, IMO.  His reputation as a “moderate” that was anything less than a standard conservative of his day is really misguided, and it’s usually things like nitpicking one nice thing he said about how unions should literally be able to exist or not knowing that the interstate system was a defense spending project, lol.