Since 1995, four separate pollsters -- NBC-WSJ, CNN, Gallup and the Pew Research Center -- have tested this question a combined four dozen times, and this is the most pro-big-government response to date.

As recently as 2011, just one-third (33 percent) of Americans favored bigger government, while 63 percent though it too big. And back in Clinton's day, shortly before the admonition above in his 1996 State of the Union address, the American people were 62-to-32 in favor of smaller government.

What changed? Well, a GOP president, of course. Republicans tend to be more skeptical of the size of government when Democrats are in power.

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But even more than that is Trump's rhetoric. While other Republicans will at least talk a good game about shrinking government, he hasn't really bothered; instead he has talked about a $1 trillion infrastructure plan and increasing government borrowing while borrowing is cheap. He gave lip service to balancing the budget as president, but as with many Trump goals, it has quickly gone by the wayside. The White House isn't even pretending that is still a goal.

And Trump's affinity for big government may be one of the truly big paradigm shifts of his presidency. He has taken in a GOP that got religion on the size of government during the Obama administration and is anxious to see what Trump's brand of populist big government can do for it -- the national debt apparently be damned.

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On another front, Republicans seem to have warmed to the idea of government involvement in health care, after decrying it for the past seven years. A January Pew Research Center poll -- even before the GOP tried and failed to replace the Affordable Care Act -- showed the percentage of Americans who think the government has a responsibility to provide health care to everyone had risen from 51 percent to 60 percent.

Among Republicans and Republican-leaning voters, it rose from 19 percent to 32 percent. And more recently, polls show a big shift in the GOP from repealing the ACA toward keeping it and restructuring it.