Donald Trump began his Presidential campaign by calling Mexican migrants criminals and rapists, he began his Presidency by signing an anti-Muslim travel ban, and he’s going into the midterms doing everything he can to gin up fears about immigrants. Along the way, his Administration has put DACA in limbo, instituted a policy of separating parents from children at the border, held children in cages, slashed the number of refugees the country takes in every year, and proposed making it harder for immigrants who receive public assistance to become legal residents. His has been an anti-immigrant Administration as much as it’s been anything else.

On Tuesday, Axios published portions of an interview its reporters recently conducted with Trump, in which the President asserted that he had the power to end birthright citizenship by executive order. “It was always told to me that you needed a constitutional amendment. Guess what? You don’t,” Trump said. Legal opinion is against Trump here—the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside”—and it’s not even clear from his quotes to Axios when or if he intends to sign such an order. But there’s an election coming up, and Trump is returning to tactics that have won him elections before, during the Republican primaries in the 2016 cycle.

Today, it’s very much worth reading the piece my colleague Amy Davidson Sorkin wrote about birthright citizenship, in September, 2015. “Birthright citizenship has become a contentious issue in the Republican primary race,” she wrote, “with outright calls that it should be done away with or disavowed (Trump, Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham); that it ‘doesn’t make any sense’ (Ben Carson); that it needs to be ‘reëxamined’ (Chris Christie); or that it is being ‘taken advantage’ of in ways that should be countered (Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush)—or just a waffling unwillingness to defend it (Scott Walker).” Trump wasn’t alone here—most of the Republican field saw questioning birthright citizenship as a necessary position to take to win the primaries. Trump was just willing to say things in a more extreme way than everybody else. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful,” Trump said during a speech in Dallas that month. “But when a man has a problem, and he’s got his wife or his girlfriend, and they move her over the border for one day, has the baby on the other side of the border—our side—now that baby is a citizen of our country for however long the baby lives.” He added, “It’s wrong. It’s wrong.” It’s hard, if not impossible, to make the case that the policies Trump has put in place as President, as harsh as they are, have changed migration patterns or dissuaded people from coming to the U.S. But staking out the most extreme positions, demonizing and dehumanizing foreigners, ragings against “those people,” this is how he won elections in 2016, and this is how he wants to win them next week.