Looking to Donald Trump`s immigration speech can he hang onto his base if he softens his stance on the issue that got him this far?

Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, sort of the three big hitters on the Republican side.

This is a terrible year [2015] in a lot of ways. You have Paris. You have San Bernardino. But there was, if you remember the summer, there was that attempted terror attack on the train in France. There were two U.S. Marines, there`s one other guy. They were three guys who got up and who stopped that attack. Nobody died. They are heroes and they are my people of the year, three of them.

The perception that Donald Trump has softened on immigration or is about to soften on immigration has some on the right concerned that he could lose support among his most loyal base of supporters, though he`d been drawn to his hard-line positions on immigration early in the campaign.

Rush Limbaugh is saying he never took Trump seriously in the first place.

He [Donald Trump] found that sweet spot in the Republican Party, just politically, where you had the rest of the party saying it`s just impractical. You can`t deport 11 million people. You can`t round them up and deport them, and his position was basically, hey, Republican voters. Don`t listen them, you can and I will.

To the extent anybody had heard of the [Charles] Kushner name at that point, it was a very tarnished name.