In case you thought you had somehow read too much into it when Donald Trump wouldn’t rule out implementing a database of all Muslims in the United States, Trump ruled it in yesterday:

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Asked by NBC News if he thinks we need a database system for tracking Muslims in the United States — citizens and non-citizens alike — Trump said that he “would certainly implement” that kind of database, among others, adding that Muslims would “have to be” legally obligated to register with such a database.

“There should be a lot of systems, beyond databases,” he added, although he didn’t elaborate as to exactly what he meant. Although he still hasn’t ruled out requiring a special ID for Muslims — something you would almost certainly need to include in order to effectively track a minority population within your own borders — so maybe that’s still on the table. Until he says it isn’t, he’s going to keep getting asked. And the longer he goes without saying no, the more of a yes his silence becomes.

NBC’s reporter followed up to ask how requiring Muslims to register with the government would be any different from Nazi Germany requiring Jews to register under the Nuremberg Laws. Trump had no answer, simply saying “you tell me” to the reporter four times in a row. He also didn’t respond when asked if there would be legal consequences for Muslims who didn’t register for said database.

But wouldn’t there have to be? And wouldn’t the enforcement mechanism have to be monumentally invasive, requiring a degree of authoritarianism that would amount to actual fascism? While Trump chalked his entire implementation strategy as simply “good management,” it’s hard to see how you get from Point A to Point B here without some kind of federal enforcement agency (the FBI?) going from mosque to mosque forcing Muslims to sign up, matching their records with social media and other databases to see if any self-described Muslims hadn’t voluntarily added their names.

In other words, it’d be a full-on 21st Century Inquisition.

What’s more, as the Southern Baptist Convention’s Russell Moore told Buzzfeed yesterday, this isn’t the kind of power you want to give to an executive — no matter how specifically-targeted the power is initially. Said Moore, speaking to Trump’s proposal of shutting down mosques associated with terrorist threats, “Evangelicals should recognize that any president who would call for shutting down houses of worship … is the sort of political power that can ultimately shut down evangelical churches.”

As I wrote yesterday, until Donald Trump pays some kind of electoral price, he’s going to continue openly calling for more and more extreme forms of Muslim persecution. As it stands right now, however, it’s hard to imagine that any of his Republican opponents stand up and call him out for the Mussolini knockoff that he is. If the median American voter has told us one thing this week, it’s that they think xenophobia is bad, but Muslims are worse. If the median Republican voter has told us one thing this week, it’s that xenophobia is actually alright, and that they’d like to see more of it from their field of candidates.