Earlier this week, Axios reported that Trump had also sought to have Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe fired. The president is fixated on McCabe, a holdover from James Comey’s directorship whose wife ran for state senate in Virginia as a Democrat. According to Jonathan Swan, Sessions pressured FBI Director Christopher Wray, whom Trump appointed to replace the fired Comey, to dismiss McCabe. But Wray refused, so Sessions backed off and told McGahn. Again, Trump has not pushed the issue.

That’s three cases in which Trump has backed down when told no. Another, marginal case is that of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. Like Sessions, he’s been subject to a barrage of public criticism from the president. In the same interview in which he implied he might fire Mueller, Trump referred to Sessions’s “deputy he hardly knew, and that’s Rosenstein, Rod Rosenstein, who is from Baltimore. There are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any.” (In fact, Trump nominated Rosenstein, who is a Republican.) The Times story on the attempted Mueller firing reports that Trump also considered firing Rosenstein. But that hasn’t happened either.

Trump has shown a notable aversion to firing anyone—he was slow to actually dismiss campaign aides, preferring to marginalize them until they left; he has not axed Sessions, despite the frequent complaints; National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn was not fired when Trump learned he had lied to Vice President Pence, but only after The Washington Post reported that fact. And he has blasted other senior officials, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn, his chief economic adviser.

But these cases also suggest that Trump’s impetuousness can be somewhat controlled by simply telling him no. The White House counsel seems to have grasped that by June. “Mr. McGahn also told White House officials that Mr. Trump would not follow through on the dismissal on his own,” the Times reported. Since then, there seems to be a greater willingness by staff to contradict Trump.

Several times in recent weeks, staff and aides have been bold in speaking up. In the past, Trump’s tweets have reoriented administration policy on a dime. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson made clear how this works earlier this month. “My staff usually has to print his tweets out and hand them to me,” he said, and then he thinks, “How do we take that and now use it?”

But when Trump contradicted the administration line in reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, he was instead obliged to walk back that view in another tweet nearly two hours later. When he nearly struck a deal with Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer on immigration, Chief of Staff John Kelly and senior adviser Stephen Miller reportedly put the kibosh on it, calling Schumer to say there was no deal.