Tucker Carlson generally seems to love his job: he is a former magazine writer who now spends his nights on Fox News, where he can be found arguing that, regardless of what President Trump has done recently, his political opponents have done something worse. On Tuesday night, hours after Trump declared that there had been “very fine people on both sides” of the Charlottesville protests, Carlson’s job became particularly difficult. For most of the media, the story of the day was that Trump seemed to regard the Charlottesville ralliers, at least some of them, as valuable political allies, even though the rally had been organized as a “pro-white demonstration.” But Carlson wanted to talk, instead, about slavery and statuary. “One thing the President said today deserves more attention than it will likely get,” he said. He noted that protesters had recently pulled down a statue of Robert E. Lee in Durham, North Carolina. And he paraphrased a question that Trump had posed at the press conference: “Which statues are next?”

What followed was a short seminar on the long history of human bondage, which produced a singularly unflattering screenshot: Carlson, midsentence, next to a series of bullet points. The first one said, “SLAVERY IS EVIL.” The third one said, “PLATO, MUHAMMAD, AZTECS ALL OWNED SLAVES.” Bill Kristol, who had once been Carlson’s boss, at The Weekly Standard, retweeted the screenshot, and added a grim judgment: “They started by rationalizing Trump. They ended by rationalizing slavery.” (The next night, of course, Carlson got his revenge.)

One of the strangest things about the Trump Presidency is that, although Trump evidently cares a great deal about his media coverage, he makes life difficult for his defenders in the media. The cleverest among them often conclude, like Carlson, that the safest course of action is to change the subject. But even as Carlson was telling viewers about the long and wide-reaching history of slavery, there were signs that some of Trump’s defenders were beginning to wonder what, exactly, they were defending.

On Thursday, in the Times, Julius Krein published an extraordinary Op-Ed titled “I Voted for Trump. And I Sorely Regret It.” Krein is the editor of American Affairs, a new political journal that aims to rethink conservatism for the Trump age and beyond. From the start, Krein had said that the journal would aim to capture the populist spirit that helped make Trump President, without pledging fealty to Trump himself. (The third issue, published today, is typically lively; it includes, to its credit, an acerbic essay criticizing the two previous issues, by Anne-Marie Slaughter.) But in the Times Krein went much further, calling Trump’s conduct “reprehensible” and his Administration feckless. He wrote, “I would urge anyone who once supported him as I did to stop defending the 45th president.”

The next day, a similarly gloomy assessment arrived from an unlikely source: Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, who was cut loose on Friday. Bannon gave an unsparing interview to The Weekly Standard in which he tried to defend President Trump while deriding Trump’s Presidency. “The Trump presidency that we fought for, and won, is over,” Bannon said. “We still have a huge movement, and we will make something of this Trump presidency. But that presidency is over.”

Krein and Bannon have differing critiques of the Trump Administration. Krein called Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville “morally disgusting and monumentally stupid”; Bannon was reportedly “proud” of Trump’s response. But they shared a hope that Trump would be a different kind of Republican President, willing to rethink or reject Party orthodoxy. Both favored forms of what is sometimes called economic nationalism—they both thought that Trump had a chance to help workers by restricting immigration, reforming taxes, and rethinking foreign policy. Krein thinks Trump has failed, while Bannon seems to think Trump has been failed by the people around him, and outmaneuvered by the “Republican establishment.” But the verdict is much the same: failure.

On Friday night, Carlson did something interesting: he joined this micro-movement, delivering a sharp opening monologue that was also a eulogy for Bannon—and, in some sense, for the Trump Administration. He noted, with some admiration, that Bannon had been “a loose cannon,” arguing that he was “flawed” but not a “bigot.” Carlson’s description of Bannon was ideologically scrambled—a tribute, perhaps, to Bannon’s ambition to use populism to redraw partisan lines. “Bannon was one of the relatively few senior staff at the White House who wouldn’t feel at home in a Hillary Clinton Adminstration,” Carlson said. “In some important ways,” he added, “Steve Bannon was more traditionally liberal than the liberals who spent the last year shrieking for his head.” Later, in an interview with a Republican consultant, Carlson asked a pointed question: “With Bannon gone, who left, among senior staff in the White House, wholeheartedly agrees with what Trump ran on?” (Between them, they could come up with only one name: Stephen Miller.) At Breitbart, where Bannon is once again the executive chairman, Joel Pollak suggested a different kind of ideological flip-flop: he wondered whether this was the moment when “Donald Trump became Arnold Schwarzenegger”: a swaggering outsider who wound up governing California, in Pollak’s estimation, “as a liberal.”

One of the great revelations of Trump’s Presidency, so far, has been that partisan lines are not so easily redrawn. Indeed, with Bannon gone, it is quite possible that the Trump White House will be more, not less, likely to follow the Republican Party line. (Despite his long history of ideological flexibility, Trump has shown little interest in co-opting Democratic policies, or winning over Democratic politicians, and he has enacted nothing that could be called a populist program.) His voters may not mind; even Bannon may find that, no matter what Trump does or fails to do, most Breitbart readers remain supportive of the President. But it seems fitting that, after only seven disastrous months, Trump, who promised to scramble the ideological map, seems to be inspiring a different kind of confusion. Some of his former defenders fret that the problem was too much Bannon; others (including, one presumes, Bannon himself) insist that the problem was not enough. Perhaps this week’s events offer a preview of postmortems to come: long after Trump is gone, his disappointed supporters may still be arguing over what, exactly, went wrong.