But there was a big difference between the unified Democratic government of 2009-2010 and the Republican majorities of today: votes. The Democrats simply had many more of them. In the House, Obama’s party controlled at least 255 seats during most of the 111th Congress, and for a seven-month stretch in late 2009, Democrats had 60 votes in the Senate—enough to defeat a GOP filibuster. When the House approved the final version of Obamacare in March 2010, the bill passed despite opposition from 34 Democrats. Republicans could have survived no more than 22 defections on the American Health Care Act last week, and when Ryan withdrew the bill, Trump said the party leadership was about 10 to 15 votes short. In other words, if Republicans had the same number of seats as Democrats did seven years ago, the legislation would have passed.

The failure of the GOP health-care bill has, rather predictably, unleashed a circular firing squad within the party. Ryan blamed the compromise-averse members of the House Freedom Caucus, who in turn blamed the moderates. Conservative activists and Trump loyalists blamed the speaker, while the president is lashing out at just about anyone who didn’t support the bill, including Democrats who were excluded from the process from the beginning.

“The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don't get on the team, & fast,” Trump tweeted Thursday morning. “We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

If the president is battling both conservatives and Democrats for the next 20 months, who does that leave to pass his agenda? Subtracting the three dozen or so members of the Freedom Caucus leaves Trump with about 200 votes in the House—well short of a 218-vote majority. At other moments in the past week, though, the president has talked about working with Democrats to strike a deal on health care.

That’s not sitting well with Ryan, who is clinging to his dream of a Republican-only agenda, however fast it might be fading. “I worry we’ll push the president into working with Democrats,” the speaker told CBS’s Norah O’Donnell in an interview broadcast Thursday morning. “I don’t want that to happen.”

The bluntness of Ryan’s remark shocked even his fellow Republican, Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who responded on Twitter: “We have come a long way in our country when the speaker of one party urges a president NOT to work with the other party to solve a problem.”

The speaker clarified later in the day that his comment was limited to health care and that he was not foreclosing the possibility of bipartisanship altogether. But the exchange underscored that the gulf within the Republican Party is just not about policy, but about governing philosophy. Ryan’s vision of legislating has rarely included Democrats, which is one reason he worked so carefully to craft health-care and tax bills that could circumvent the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate.