Did Republicans try to undo New Deal policies during the Eisenhower Administration, or try to roll back Medicare and Medicaid during the Nixon Administration, in the way that Republicans under the Trump Administration are trying to undo the Affordable Care Act?

Domestically, the Eisenhower years are generally associated with anticommunism, particularly McCarthyism, and an abandonment of the New Deal. Certainly some post-war changes (the 1946 Republican Congress in general and the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 that curtailed the power of labour unions in spite of president Truman's veto) seem to indicate that, but in the long run legislation passed under the Eisenhower administration was far from a complete abolition of New Deal policies. In fact, the anti-communism of the fifties led in certain cases to an expansion of the welfare state. This follows the same logic as Marshall aid: By making sure that certain needs are provided for, that the basic necessities of life were taken care of, people would be less likely to turn to extremist political ideologies (read: communism). This wasn't the type of cradle-to-grave welfare that was being developed in most of post-World War II Europe. Still, the Fair Housing Act was mostly kept intact, and measures like the GI Bill would definitely fit within the larger mold of New Deal policies. The Eisenhower years also saw a tax rate of 91% on the highest income bracket. The Eisenhower years saw the rise of William F. Buckley, his National Review, and a whole new generation of conservatives who felt that the Eisenhower administration wasn't going far enough in rolling back the New Deal. Of course for much of his presidency Eisenhower had to deal with Democratic control of Congress, although with the growing rift between Deep South Democrats and East Coast Democrats they were far from a unanimous voting bloc. In general however, Eisenhower sought to be a consensus president, and with that came no serious rollbacks of New Deal policies.

Nixon was actually a proponent of expansion of Medicare/Medicaid. In his childhood he had seen two of his siblings die. His brother younger Arthur died after a relatively short illness but his oldest brother Harold dealt with lingering tuberculosis for more than a decade. This lingering illness, and the financial hardships it inflicted on the whole of the Nixon family, stayed with him for the rest of his life. When you read Nixon's autobiography he is relatively understated on the subject in regards to the emotional impact it had on him, but if you read between the lines you begin to see how powerful the impact was on the Nixon family. Nixon had inherited from his family a staunch belief in the idea that any American would be able to take care of his family through hard work. The strain Harold's lingering illness and the costs associated with it placed on his family shone through in multiple bankruptcies, the numerous summer jobs Richard Nixon took to support his family and even the absurd thrift he lived in for most of his life. When you read Nixon's 1971 State of the Union address he stated that:

"As a fourth great goal, I will offer a far-reaching set of proposals for improving America's health care and making it available more fairly to more people.

I will propose:

--A program to insure that no American family will be prevented from obtaining basic medical care by inability to pay.

--I will propose a major increase in and redirection of aid to medical schools, to greatly increase the number of doctors and other health personnel.

--Incentives to improve the delivery of health services, to get more medical care resources into those areas that have not been adequately served, to make greater use of medical assistants, and to slow the alarming rise in the costs of medical care.

--New programs to encourage better preventive medicine, by attacking the causes of disease and injury, and by providing incentives to doctors to keep people well rather than just to treat them when they are sick."

So when it came to healthcare, Nixon essentially proposed a program that in certain areas went further than the Affordable Care Act, especially in terms of the use of government funding to expand the number of doctors and other medical personnel working in the United States. This by no means meant that Nixon went after any and all healthcare reform. His own State of the Union proposals were a counter-offer against the more liberal Kennedy-Griffiths bill that had been introduced in 1970. Before any kind of consensus could be reached on healthcare policy however, Watergate started entering the public debate, which made ambitious legislation like expanded healthcare coverage impossible to pass.