Michael Gerson, who used to write speeches for George W. Bush, has been a columnist at the Washington Post for several years. He’s mostly been a reliable mouthpiece for the Republican Establishment with a side dose of evangelical lecturing.

He is expressing concern for the direction his party is heading, particularly with Trump in the lead for the Presidential nomination. Gerson does not like Trump.

The presidential candidate who has consistently led the Republican field for four months, Donald Trump, has proposed: to forcibly expel 11 million people from the country, requiring a massive apparatus of enforcement, courts and concentration camps; to rewrite or reinterpret the 14th Amendment to end the Civil War-era Republican principle of birthright citizenship; to build a 2,000-mile wall on our southern border while forcing Mexico to pay the cost. He has characterized undocumented Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers, and opposed the speaking of Spanish in the United States.

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There are, of course, Republican presidential hopefuls who have vigorously opposed each of these proposals, arguments and stereotypes. But Trump has, so far, set the terms of the primary debate and dragged other candidates in the direction of ethnic and religious exclusion.

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And Trump would make — has already half-made — the GOP into an anti-immigrant party. Much of Trump’s appeal is reactionary. He has tapped into a sense that an older America is being lost.

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It does not take much political talent to turn this sense of cultural displacement into anti-immigrant resentment; only a reckless disregard for the moral and political consequences.

As denial in the GOP fades, a question is laid upon the table: Is it possible, and morally permissible, for economic and foreign policy conservatives, and for Republicans motivated by their faith, to share a coalition with the advocates of an increasingly raw and repugnant nativism?

Well, Mr. Gerson, it seems to me that all those folks you just called out are somehow hoping he’ll go away, a victim of his own bluster and its effect on voters. Veteran GOP strategist and former Congressman Vin Weber asks a pertinent question: “How can you be the leader in national polls,” Weber says, “and in the early states, and maybe even in money, and be counted out?”

How indeed?