Matt Yglesias has a piece on Vox.com in which he essentially says that it is ironic that Trump is so critical of George W. Bush, because he is his ideological heir. While there are fragments of truth in the article, I think the logic behind it is flawed, for reasons which, as usual, return us to the structure of the Republican Party.
Bush 43 was a quintessential Romney Coalition candidate; in fact, you might just as well call it the Bush Coalition. While his tax cuts and proposals for deregulation were standard PBP fare, “Compassionate Conservatism” is a good shorthand way to describe the Christian Democrat agenda, which involves the use of government, through market mechanisms, to assist the poor. Trump, on the other hand, is a Reagan Coalition candidate; what makes him different from most such candidates is his tilt towards the Reactionary faction of the coalition. Reactionaries are not opposed to the welfare state so long as the “right kind of people” are the principal beneficiaries; attempts to redistribute wealth for the benefit of the poor are anathema. Reactionaries consequently object to cuts in Social Security and Medicare, which, in their eyes, are just a form of repayment to them (i.e., they are not a redistribution), but they loathe the subsidies in Obamacare.
Trump’s support of Social Security and Medicare do not, therefore, put him in the Bush camp. The real heir to the Bush ideological legacy is Marco Rubio, with his neoconservative foreign policy leanings and his tax cuts for the working poor.