Start with the bill in question. Trump had promised during the campaign to repeal and replace Obamacare “immediately” with something that would avoid mandates but maintain popular provisions that prohibit discrimination for preexisting conditions and allow people to stay on their parents’ insurance plans until 26. He also planned to make coverage available to anyone who wanted it, and to not touch Medicare and Medicaid. There is a plan that would do this: a single-payer universal health system. But since that wasn’t going to happen with a Republican president and Republican Congress, there was no obvious way for Trump to fulfill his promises.

Even by those standards, the American Health Care Act was politically toxic—which is, of course, one reason it failed in Congress. One poll found it had 17 percent approval. It would have cut federal funding for Medicaid, and it would have dramatically increased premiums for many voters, including Trump supporters. In the short term, the demise of the AHCA was a political disaster for the Trump administration, but in the long run, passing it might have been a greater disaster.

One side effect of the bill’s failure has been strain between Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan. The two were always an odd pair; they disagreed on a range of fundamental issues, especially entitlements (Ryan wants to cut them; Trump promised to preserve them) and free-trade agreements (Ryan likes them; Trump hates them). They were temperamentally different; Ryan was obviously skeptical of Trump during the election, while the Trump-friendly site Breitbart had long sniped at Ryan.

Yet for a brief moment it seemed like there might be a productive truce between the two sides. Ex-Breitbart boss Steve Bannon, now Trump’s chief strategist, met with Ryan in January and managed to find some common ground. Trump allowed Ryan to direct the design of the health bill and the process for passing it. On Friday, Ezra Klein wrote that despite promising to change the way Washington and the Republican Party worked,

Trump has become a pitchman for Paul Ryan and his agenda. He’s spent the past week fighting for a health care bill he didn’t campaign on, didn’t draft, doesn’t understand, doesn’t like to talk about, and can’t defend. Rather than forcing the Republican establishment to come around to his principles, he’s come around to theirs — with disastrous results.

Immediately after Ryan and Trump agreed to pull the bill on Friday, Trump insisted he didn’t blame Ryan. But White House officials were already placing the blame at his feet in anonymous quotes to reporters. Trump also enigmatically encouraged his Twitter followers to tun in to Jeanine Pirro’s Fox News show on Saturday; she led off her show calling for Ryan to step down, which White House officials insisted was merely coincidental.