Stephen Miller has unveiled the latest prong in his plan to make America white again, a set of draconian restrictions on the ability of poor and working-class immigrants to obtain U.S. citizenship. The proposal would affect those who have used social services, including food stamps, during their time in the United States. This would make some green card holders who sought to put groceries on the table for their children—or who fulfilled their duty under the Affordable Care Act to buy health insurance—ineligible for naturalization. It is not an accident that the White House is fast-tracking this barbaric policy just a few months before the midterm elections, because the modern Republican Party stands for despising brown people and not much else.

Republican politicians do not want this to be true. They aspire to be the party that does things like reduce the number of burdensome regulations, and stimulate economic growth via sensible tax cuts, and keep the bloated federal bureaucracy out of health insurance markets. Alas, that party is not their party. In a recent poll, 67 percent of Republican voters report approving of President Trump's performance; 63 percent say they strongly approve of his immigration policy; and 67 percent are strongly in favor of constructing the elusive border wall. Among all voters, too, there is startlingly close alignment between his immigration approval rating and his overall approval rating. As Stef Kight writes on Axios, "Trump's immigration policies play a huge role in how the public sees his presidency. If they're with him on immigration, they're with him on everything."

When it became clear that Jeb and Marco and Ted and the rest of the 2016 also-rans would be unable able to stop Trump's ascendance within their ranks, many Republicans struck a Faustian bargain with themselves, treating the bigotry that invigorated the GOP as an unpleasant but utilitarian aberration. All this rah-rah, Mexicans-are-rapists, build-that-wall shit is a little xenophobic for my tastes. But if tolerating it yields a president who will enable us to implement our agenda, the people will see how smart and right our ideas are, and they will be overwhelmed with gratitude for all the good we do. Everyone who reached this conclusion is a coward. Also, everyone who reached this conclusion is wrong.

This comes as sobering news for those Republicans who hoped to win power via racism and then retain power via the outpouring of appreciation they expected to follow. They imagine themselves as participants in a good-faith policy debate, one that they win on the merits whenever they are afforded the opportunity. But as it turns out, none of these scholarly, erudite arguments about tax policy and health care are nearly as resonant with Trump voters as a willingness to exploit racial animus for political gain, by railing against the horrors of sanctuary cities, or branding children as murderous gang members-in-training, or imprisoning toddlers, or any of the other myriad abominations perpetrated by this administration over the past 18 months.

Whatever remained of the old Republican Party after 2016, if anything, is gone. Today's GOP is an entity whose core issue is fomenting hatred for immigrants. And as Miller's latest crusade demonstrates, their surest path to continued relevance is finding creative new methods of appeasing the voters who rewarded them for it.

Watch:

The Roots of Trump’s Prejudice