A few years ago I had the pleasure of hearing the recollections of a conservative gentleman who, in his youth, had spent some time as an ardent supporter of a radical movement, only to become disillusioned when the group failed to gain any political traction. “But it all turned out for the best,” he reflected philosophically. “I mean, really, what if we had won?”

This brings us to the ultimate issue posed by the Donald Trump candidacy. Many Republicans are concerned that if Trump were to take the GOP nomination he would almost certainly lose the general election, thereby surrendering the White House to four more years of Democrat governance. To be sure, that would be a very bad outcome for the 2016 election. But there is another possibility, which could potentially be much worse. What if Trump were to win?

If Trump were to win, he would certainly need to act on his signature issue, which is mass deportation of illegal immigrants. Across the nation, businesses, neighborhoods, homes and churches would be subject to raids by federal agents seeking to find and arrest the intruders. To facilitate the round-up, the creation of networks of paid informers would no doubt prove invaluable, as would a national-citizen identification system, both of which, without question, would remain part of the American political landscape forever afterwards. Those ferreted out would probably end up gathered in reeking collection facilities resembling those that the federal government established for those displaced by Hurricane Katrina, before being forcibly packed en masse into buses and dumped off, with or without their American-citizen children, on the southern side of the border.