For years now, the debate within the Republican Party over how to reform the country’s immigration system has pitted more moderate and business-minded members of the GOP against nativists—most of whom have framed their opposition to amnesty for undocumented immigrants as an idealistic fealty to law and order, their opposition to immigration flows from Mexico as populist concern for working-class wages.

Donald Trump, through a campaign of racist incitement against minorities, and Mexicans in particular, has stripped away the veneer masking the passions driving that debate.

His depiction of the issue foregrounds alarmist and inaccurate renderings of Mexicans as rapists and marauders who threaten the integrity and the purity—really, the racial purity—of white America. Wages have very little to do with the story he tells about immigration. His appeal all along is that he would stop pussyfooting around the issue like other Republicans and speak the truth: If these immigrants are really so bad, such a threat, why not kick all of them out, then consider letting the “good ones” back in?

The problem with this idea, of course, is that it’s highly offensive—alienating to minorities of every ethnicity, to liberals, to white people who live and work among immigrants, the overwhelming majority of the country. Reactionary immigration policy was the key factor that allowed Trump to hack the Republican Party, but it is now a major impediment to his ability to reassure moderate Republicans he isn’t unacceptably racist.

Republicans are on the losing end of a decades-old demographic gamble, and Trump embodies their resulting bind. Reflecting the passions of their base makes Republicans toxic to the electorate at large and even to one another; appealing to minorities on the basis of humane policy makes Republicans toxic to many of their own supporters. It’s a bit like trying to stretch a carpet across all corners of a floor when the problem is that the carpet is too small.