At his rallies, presidential candidate Donald Trump excited his most avid supporters through displays of toughness: his calls when a demonstrator acted up to “get him out of here”; his incantations of his reality show signature “You’re fired”; his promises of robust actions on “Day One.” He promised his ecstatic followers that he’d tear up trade treaties and the Iran nuclear deal. He’d force other countries to renegotiate and he’d be tough in his dealings with them, just as he’d been in business. And he’d show those so-called NATO allies that the U.S. wasn’t committed to defending them—no more of the wishy-washy deference to other nations that Barack Obama had displayed for eight years. Also, on that busy Day One, he’d have a replacement for Obamacare ready for Congress to enact immediately. He’d pick the very best people but wouldn’t hesitate to get rid of someone who wasn’t up to the job. Above all, he’d be decisive, no vacillating figurehead. He’d be a man of action, tough and strong.

And then ...

Trump not only didn’t have an alternative to Obamacare ready on his first day in office, he never offered one. Moreover, when House Republicans presented to him their own ideas about what should be in the health care bill, they found him to be an easy mark. This was in part because the president didn’t much care what was in the health care bill, he just wanted to sign one; he told aides that would make him look presidential. He’d said in the campaign that he’d produce a health care bill that was better and cheaper than Obamacare, but it turned out that Trump was unfamiliar with the substance of what was in the Affordable Care Act and didn’t grasp the import of proposed alternatives—and this crippled his ability to be a force on the subject. Or, as it’s turning out, most any subject. He keeps telling us what a fine mind he has, but if so he seems loath to exercise it much. His advisers on national security have been encouraged to put as much of their daily intelligence briefings in pictures and charts as they can. A president who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know isn’t in a very strong position to negotiate with others, or to lead.

A president without proposals of his own cannot set the nation’s agenda except in the broadest strokes (as in: next, the tax bill). Ignorant of how the legislative branch works, he let the Republican leaders set the priorities and was surprised that even though his party had the majority, Congress wasn’t more deferential to him. And then, when it came to major substantive questions—whether to stick with the Iran deal, how to resolve the status of undocumented immigrants who came into the country as children, and, most recently, how far to go in smashing Obamacare subsidies—he turned these matters over to Congress to resolve.

In addition, Trump has vacillated on several issues. He publicly reversed himself on whether he supported a compromise reached in mid-October between Republican Lamar Alexander and Democrat Patty Murray, which would stabilize the Obamacare markets and keep the program from being cut off from millions of low-income people by authorizing the payments (which the president had just ended by executive order) to health insurers for two years in exchange for granting states greater flexibility in implementing the ACA. (The Congressional Budget Office said this compromise would lower the budget deficit by $3.8 billion, making it the first health care proposal this year that got a positive rating.) First, Trump supported the compromise. Then, eleven minutes later, he opposed it. What had happened in between was clear enough, and by now familiar: The far right was against the compromise, both in “principle” and because its purpose was to shore up the despised Obamacare; conservative House Republicans (which is most of them) have zero interest in doing anything that would prop up the health care program passed in 2010, which they still passionately preferred to repeal and replace. The question of where Trump will ultimately come down on the compromise is still up in the air.