In a few short months, Trump has vastly grown America’s appetite for draconian government. He has proposed rounding up millions of undocumented Latinos and evicting them en masse. He is determined to close mosques. He wants to massively expand surveillance of Americans and has even flirted with issuing identification cards to Muslims. “Trump’s proposals have gone from overt prejudice to things literally taken out of late Weimar history,” as The Week columnist Ryan Cooper has noted…

But Latinos are well positioned to thwart the Republican bid for the presidency and save America from itself. They came out in droves in swing states and defeated Mitt Romney in 2012 after his tough talk against them. Republicans will need Latinos even more badly in the 2016 election, since Latinos will constitute an even larger share of the voting-age public. (Some credible estimates suggest that Republicans will need 42 to 47 percent of the Latino vote, in contrast to George Bush’s 40 percent, to win the White House). But it is hard to see any scenario, even one where Marco Rubio is the nominee, in which they can pull that kind of Latino support after their far nastier tone in this primary.

The reason that FDR got away with his mass internment of Japanese Americans in World War II was that the foreign born made up less than 7 percent of the population then. Now they are close to 13 percent. This makes them a more formidable electoral force against government excesses, just as Madison had envisioned.