Donald Trump commandeering the GOP with his xenophobic vileness is the price the party has to pay for refusing to work with President Obama on immigration reform.

I didn’t believe a second Obama term would chasten his enemies across the aisle the way some did (even the President), but I believed immigration was the one area in which Republicans would bend since their future pretty much depended on it. If the issue had been handled right after their broad defeat in 2012, it would have largely been yesterday’s news by now. But as gerrymandering damages the nation as a whole, it’s likewise done no wonders for conservatives. Finding it unnecessary to yield to prevailing winds has enabled the GOP to move into another national election dragging the past behind it, prone to the opportunistic rantings of a lowest common denominator like Trump. He’s yours. You own him.

From “The Dream World of Southern Republicans,” Howell Raines’s op-ed in the New York Times:

Even more dramatic changes in voter attitudes will shift the region’s party balance, to the detriment of the Republicans. This won’t come about because current Republican voters and their elected officials now in office will somehow be converted, but because they will be overwhelmed by new voters in the burgeoning Hispanic and Asian communities, who will join the black minority. Over half of the nation’s 40 million blacks live in the South.

For the time being, however, a traveler through the South can’t help but notice that its affluent, suburban whites remain myopic about the obvious signs, like the multiracial families to be seen among Walmart shoppers on any given day in any shopping mall.

Houston and Dallas are among the 11 American cities with the largest Hispanic populations. Vibrant Vietnamese communities are all along the Gulf Coast. Major cities have Spanish-language advertising, and have or soon will have sleek Latino-oriented shopping centers, like the new one on the fashionable southern side of Birmingham. The Asian presence in the medical, academic and business communities is substantial and growing, perhaps most notably in Baton Rouge, where Bobby Jindal, the governor of Louisiana and presidential candidate (who is Asian-American, like Gov. Nikki R. Haley of South Carolina), works.

Judging from the laws they are passing, Southern Republicans seem untroubled by Mitt Romney’s 17 percent of the minority vote in the last presidential election. It seems an overstatement to say that Southern Republicans are in outright denial about the fact that whites will be a minority in America around 2043. It does seem fair to say that the national Republican Party is underreacting, and Southern Republicans seem to be especially resistant to appealing to their minority neighbors.•