Last month, Donald Trump announced on Twitter that the “United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” reversing an Obama-era policy. The tweet had all the bearings of an official executive action, with none of the planning or agency consultation that would normally go into such a significant, controversial, and complicated policy change. The Pentagon itself was blindsided: as The New York Times reported, Defense Secretary James Mattis had been in the middle of conducting a study on integrating transgender soldiers and received only a day’s notice before Trump’s tweet. Chaos reigned as officials struggled to respond to questions about whether the order applied to people already in the service, whether thousands of troops would be expelled, or if the new policy would only apply moving forward.

The military quickly responded that it would not be changing anything until it received more information. “There will be no modifications to the current policy until the President’s direction has been received by the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary has issued implementation guidance,” Marine General Joe Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in an internal memo. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders acknowledged that “the implementation policy is going to be something that the White House and the Department of Defense are going to have to work together to lawfully determine.”

One month later, Trump’s tweet is still lost in translation. On Friday night, as Hurricane Harvey pummeled Houston, the president finally signed an executive order putting his transgender troop ban into action. After criticism from the Pentagon, the document gave Mattis discretion to study the issue and decide how to implement it. On Tuesday, Mattis announced that transgender troops could continue to serve while he convened a panel of experts to properly assess the situation, effectively freezing Trump’s order.

The whiplash over Trump’s hastily tweeted order is the latest in a series of humbling setbacks for the president, who has repeatedly seen his whims stymied by the realities of the political process. Axios’s Mike Allen itemizes the indignities: “SecDef Mattis didn’t immediately embrace his full ban on transgender troops. His Justice Department won’t drop the Russia probe. Courts won’t allow his full Muslim ban. Mexico won’t pay for his wall. Congress won’t pay for his wall. The Senate won’t pass his promised health-care reform. Gary Cohn and Sec State [Rex] Tillerson won’t tolerate his Charlottesville response. North Korea won’t heed his warnings. China doesn’t fear his trade threats.” The list goes on and on.

Trump is slowly realizing his own limitations as president, legal or otherwise. At the beginning of his administration, a spree of hastily issued executive orders, including his arguably discriminatory Muslim travel ban, caused massive chaos and legal headaches for the White House. Supporters and critics alike noted that the order might have had a better chance of survival if it had been properly studied, vetted, and approved by legal and congressional stakeholders instead of being rushed out the door and straight into an injunction. With his transgender troop ban, Trump appears to have made the same mistake again. It could be months before Mattis completes his review of the new policy, which would almost certainly be reversed again by a Democratic administration. Until then, the military appears to be biding its time.