Not long after Speaker of the House Paul Ryan left the White House on Friday afternoon, he stood in front of reporters admitting defeat. He had just convinced President Donald Trump to pull their health care reform bill—a bill which he and Trump had spent the week guaranteeing Americans that the Republican party would pass. Repealing and replacing Obamacare is something the party had promised to get done for seven years. Only now, it had majorities in the House, the Senate, and, in official party identification, the White House, too.

But despite the political trifecta—and despite the fact that Ryan and Trump had spent the week cajoling various factions of House conservatives, carting in Chick-fil-A to the Freedom Caucus and ordering in stacks of pizza boxes and bags of Baked Lays to Ryan’s office on Capitol Hill for the Tuesday Group—the effort still failed. All the concessions, the threats of retaliation from the president, the pleading from Ryan ultimately didn’t garner enough votes for a mess of bill that had gone to mush with compromise. Ryan urged the president to pull the bill Friday afternoon, over lunch of chicken and twice-baked potatoes. On that the two agreed.

“Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains and, well, we’re feeling those growing pains today,” Ryan said at his subsequent press conference. “I will not sugarcoat this. This is a disappointing day for us. Doing big things is hard.”

What will make this harder going forward is the fact that the governing party is led by a president with no prior political experience who has not exactly presented a strong, steady set of political beliefs to guide the various factions into agreement. (He was once upon a time a pro-choice New York Democrat, after all.) In a revealing interview with The New York Times Magazine’s Robert Draper published Sunday as part of a larger piece about the president’s relationship with Congress, Trump showed little interest in the finer points of policy. Asked about economic nationalism—an ideology that is arguably responsible for his unexpected win—Trump offered few points of clarity. “Well, ‘nationalism’ — I define it as people who love the country and want it to do good,” he said. “I don’t see ‘nationalism’ as a bad word. I see it as a very positive word. It doesn’t mean we won’t trade with other countries.” When asked for more details about his promised infrastructure plan, Trump offered that “real work is going to be done on bridges and roads and airports and things that we’re supposed to be doing. So it’s not just a political piece of paper. We’re going to do infrastructure, and it’s going to be a very big thing.” Draper reported that Trump was easily distracted and more interested in discussing “fake news” reporters and his speech before the joint sessions of Congress last month: ”I certainly have gotten great reviews—even the people who hate me gave me the highest review.”

That the president was uninterested in fully articulating the moving pieces of an agenda he painted in broad strokes on the campaign trail is not to suggest that the White House is visionless. Chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon, a key architect of Trump’s agenda, was happy to expound on economic nationalism, a philosophy based on pushing trade deals, immigration reform, foreign policy, infrastructure spending, and jobs programs that breathe life back into the working class.

“The working class, and in particular the lower middle class, understands something that’s so obvious—which is that they’ve basically underwritten the rise of China. Their jobs, their raises, their retirement accounts have all fueled the private equity and venture capital that built China. Because China’s really built on investments and exports, right? People are smart enough to know that they’re getting played by both political parties,” Bannon told Draper. On infrastructure, he explained that “economic nationalism is predicated on a state-of-the-art infrastructure for the country, right? Broadband as good as Korea. Airports as good as China. Roads as good as Germany. A rail system as good as France. If you’re going to be a world-class power, you’ve got to have a world-class infrastructure.”

But in order to make Bannon’s vision a reality, Congress, in its divided, factious state, needs to be on board. As the chaotic process that led to the shelving Republican health care plan demonstrated on Friday, it’s very much not. Part of this may be the fact that Bannon is well aware that his ideals won’t sit well with the conservative powers that be. In an interview with Michael Wolff after the election, Bannon likened his agenda to Andrew Jackson’s populism. “We’re going to build an entirely new political movement. It’s everything related to jobs. The conservatives are going to go crazy.”

Whether or not they go crazy, they certainly are not getting on board. That is why health care—what should have been a soaring win for the party—went up in flames. Freedom Caucus member and Idaho representative Raúl Labrador told Draper that “the legislation has to go through the body, not the top. And if our leadership thinks now that we’re a unified body, that they can do things while ignoring us, that’s not going to happen.”

A big part of this showdown will come from spending. In Trump’s philosophy—to the extent that there is one—he told Draper that the government needs to “prime the pump” in order to get the economy moving. “We’re going to have to prime the pump to some extent,” he said. “In other words: Spend money to make a lot more money in the future. And that’ll happen.”

It won’t, if the Freedom Caucus has anything to do with it. In explaining this, Labrador brought up Trump’s speech to the joint session of Congress last month. “At some point, the reality of the budget is going to have to hit him,” Labrador said. “You can have this economic nationalism—Bannon is very smart, he clearly helped him with his messaging, it was so successful—but at some point, that theory is going to hit reality.”

That reality wall may arise again when it comes to tax reform. It’s an agenda that conservatives and the White House want to push, but that offers plenty of potential for disagreements on specifics that could blow the whole thing up. Ryan and the White House want to push a border-adjustment tax that will have the Koch Brother wing of the Republican parties headed for the exits. Then there is the group of what Draper calls military Hawks, like John McCain, who warn that Trump’s trade ideas remind him of the 1930s. “It’s unbelievable to me that they somehow think if we start taxing goods coming across the border, that that’s somehow not going to be responded to by the Mexicans. Please. History shows this sort of action gets you into a trade war,” McCain told Draper.

So how can Trump get anything done going forward? With so many caveats and such possible divisions within the Republican party, the White House appears to be looking across the aisle. On Friday, the president signaled that he would be open to working with Democrats on health care reform. Reince Priebus, the president’s chief of staff, reiterated that his boss would be open to seeking Democrats’ help on Sunday morning in an interview with Fox News’s Chris Wallace. “If Democrats come on board with a plan down the road, we’ll welcome that,” he said.

On Sunday morning, the president tweeted that it looks like the Democrats came out as winners here, casting blame on the Freedom Caucus and members of his current party.

Trump borrowed the Republican label in recent years, because it allowed him the greatest chance of success. Now, the fractious party is responsible for his biggest, most deeply-bruising loss yet. As his fixations on crowd size, electoral margins, and speech reviews have shown, Trump’s guiding principle is not tagged to any one bill or legislative mastery, but in coming out victorious. If that’s not going to come from the Republican party, then he’s going to move onto who’s next. If that’s the Democrats, well, what’s in a party name, anyway?