Can someone explain to me when the Republican Party switched from being about small government to supporting authoritarian rule?

I'm not crazy, am I? Those are two fully incompatible ideologies, right? Like, 200 executive orders in a single day, and dozens every day for the following week doesn't exactly scream small government to me. It screams massive government overreach, from my perspective.

Am I misunderstanding something?

And when did it happen? Did Reagan do it? Did he start it and it happened gradually? If I were a student in a world history class in Europe in 2090, how would that teacher explain this?