Did Donald Trump pivot on immigration over the past weekend? Or was that just a figment of our collective imagination? There were multiple reports of a drastic shift in Trump’s position on amnesty in a meeting with Hispanic leaders. And when new campaign manager/chief surrogate Kellyanne Conway said on Sunday that the question of a massive deportation force to implement his long-promised plan of evicting all illegals was “to be determined,” it seemed the shift was real. But by Monday night, Trump was assuring a crowd of supporters that there was no change on the issue. In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, he denied those reports and doubled down on mass deportation. And a big speech on immigration scheduled for later this week was cancelled.

So what was all that about? Did Trump really flirt with a flip-flop on immigration urged on him by advisors who know that he’s losing—only to pull back? Or was it just more evidence of the same chaos and lack of discipline that has plagued the GOP candidate ever since he clinched the nomination? Likely both.

For more than a year, the Trump campaign wasn’t consistent on much except his hard-line immigration stance. He was going to build a wall, make Mexico pay for it, and deport all illegal aliens. The first assertion was unlikely, and the other two were fantasies, but these stands won him the backing of Republicans who felt, not without reason, that the rule of law was being eroded by the Obama administration’s push to legalize the illegals as well as the left’s sanctuary city movement.

Now Trump finds himself trailing Hillary Clinton. Though he has no hope of improving on his dismal support among blacks and Hispanics, Trump’s most critical problem may be his inability to unite voters in the GOP. With many polls showing his support among Republicans dipping below 80 percent (while Clinton gets more than nine out of ten Democrats), it’s clear that unless Trump can find a way to rally educated white voters and female Republicans behind him, he has little chance to win the swing states that will decide the election.

So it’s reasonable to conclude that the talk of watering down his rabid anti-immigration stands is an attempt to signal moderate Republicans that he can be counted on to govern responsibly. Accounts of his conversation with Hispanic leaders also seemed to reflect the kind of realism about immigration that his pronouncements about the wall and mass deportations have lacked. He was said to have expressed regret about attacks on Mexican immigrants in which he referred to them as “rapists” and “drug dealers.” Indeed, even on O’Reilly as he sought to reassure his backers that he had weakened his positions, he claimed to want to deport people in a “humane way” that would get the “bad people” out of the country without saying whether that might mean amnesty for the others.

Perhaps those who have cheered his rhetoric on immigration should also pay close attention to his correct assertion that he could deport illegals without the benefit of new laws: “What people don’t know is that Obama got tremendous numbers of people out of the country, Bush the same thing. … Lots of people were brought out of the country with the existing laws. Well I’m gonna do the same thing.”

Wouldn’t this would mean Trump is ditching his claims about the rule of law on immigration collapsing under Obama’s directive?

None of it makes any sense. The pivot to realism on immigration—just like the kindler and gentler Donald Trump we’ve been expecting—is still illusory.