While Republicans spent much of the past week throwing a fit over Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, with its vivid descriptions of Donald Trump in decline, they breathed a sigh of relief over what many see as a net-positive effect: the political decapitation of Steve Bannon, the former Trump strategist-turned-populist agitator and unlikely Wolff informant. Bannon, after his expulsion from the White House, had promised to primary their congressmen, depose their leadership, and stack the House and Senate with his fellow populist-nationalist lunatics. It was a civil war the party could ill afford, what with the Senate held by just one seat and the House in danger of flipping in 2018. Instead, after his alleged comments to Wolff were made public, Bannon found himself in the political wilderness, disavowed by Trump and excommunicated by his patrons, the Mercers. On Tuesday, he stepped down as executive chairman of Breitbart News, leaving the G.O.P., suddenly, without its most strident—and singular—voice.

“Now we can focus on the movement,” one Breitbart staffer told my colleague Gabriel Sherman, saying Bannon had become a distraction. “He never sought to make friends,” agreed an editor at a competing conservative publication when I asked about the fallout. “He never sought to band together with anyone. He lived his life by rejecting everything, including the people he should have been in league with.” But what the populist-nationalist movement and its league of acolytes stands for remains somewhat nebulous. While Trump has always been the animating spirit of Trumpism, Bannon harnessed and directed its energies toward specific targets. His infamous whiteboard of policy goals never really went anywhere, but at least they provided an outline for Trump’s chaotic presidency.

What Republican leaders will pursue in 2018, without their nationalist bogeyman at the door, is even less obvious. Over the weekend, party elders—Mitch McConnell, his House counterpart Paul Ryan, Steve Scalise, and countless others—had huddled at Camp David with the president to address the agenda for the coming year. As they emerged from their discussions for a press conference on Saturday, there didn’t seem to be a good answer. Standing at the podium, flanked by several high-ranking Republicans, Trump promised to continue fighting the opioid crisis (an unambiguously good move) and threatened to deport hundreds of thousands of DACA recipients if he did not get funding for a border wall (his central campaign promise). Other than that, the rest was noise: vague references to a “very bold agenda”; Trump trashing Michael Wolff; intimations of violence toward North Korea. Welfare reform, a priority of Ryan’s, was downgraded to something they’d do if there was a “bipartisan way” to achieve it, and infrastructure reform was mentioned once in passing.

Outside of Camp David, Trump’s political supporters—the ones who weren’t chained to Breitbart, anyways—were equally vague, if elated, about the party’s prospects post-Bannon. “I would have to say, ultimately, it’s up to the candidates themselves to determine where they stand and where they appeal to Republican primary voters,” Steven Law, the president and C.E.O. of the Senate Leadership Fund, told me. The most important thing, he said, was that they favored the “conservative direction.”

Trump-allied PACs, too, seem to be in a holding pattern, absent direction from the White House. Congressional leaders are mostly focused on avoiding a minefield of their own making: sidestepping a government shutdown; finding a legislative fix to prevent the mass deportation of the Dreamers; finding funding for a border wall they’re not sure they need; performing brinkmanship with Iran and North Korea without sparking a war. With only a one-vote margin in the Senate, Republicans aren’t expecting much progress on the legislative calendar for the year. It doesn’t help that this is an election year, meaning that they’ll be trapped between Democratic insurgents to their left and a rabid pool of Trumpian primary challengers to their right.

“There’s a reason Jeff Flake isn’t running again. There’s a reason why [Bob] Corker isn’t running again,” said Ted Harvey, the chairman of the Committee to Defend the President PAC. “They know they could not win a re-election with the current populist, conservative, America First sentiment that is out there.” That sentiment, Harvey suggested, would be enacting Trump’s immigration vision and repealing Obamacare, which Ryan and McConnell have already abandoned.

As for Bannon, Harvey was skeptical that his message had lost its purchase in Republican politics, even if circumstances had conspired to kill the messenger. “I don’t think Trump would have won, had it not been for Bannon’s persistence to get the message out there to the rest of the Republicans that Trump had what it took to win.” And, as Lee Stranahan, a self-styled acolyte of Andrew Breitbart, told me, reflecting on Bannon’s ouster, it’s a message that is now self-sustaining. “The global sweep towards populism and economic nationalism/regionalism is much bigger than Stephen K. Bannon.”