In the wake of Trumpcare’s spectacular demise last week, Republicans are having a difficult time sticking to a coherent story about what went wrong, what comes next, and why they’ll succeed.

President Donald Trump appeared determined on Friday to shift the GOP’s attention away from health care, saying, “[W]e will probably start going very, very strongly for the big tax cuts and tax reform. That will be next.” The same day, House Speaker Paul Ryan said that “Obamacare is the law of the land ... for the foreseeable future.” But earlier this week, the White House and Republican leaders reportedly decided to give American Health Care Act the old college try again. “We are going to keep getting at this thing,” Ryan assured donors on Monday. “We’re not going to just all of a sudden abandon health care and move on to the rest.”

It is easy to see why Republicans are so discombobulated. In their telling, Obamacare repeal was supposed to be the climactic achievement of a newly consolidated GOP government. But when Trump won the presidency, giving Republicans their opening, the GOP delivered no gratification at all.

The failure of Trumpcare wasn’t a tactical one, though, nor was it one that Republicans can correct with more practice. It was a harbinger of a larger reckoning with the disparity between the payoff they promised and the truth of their inadequacies. There will likely be no quick and seamless transition to tax reform, or to any major legislative initiative that they intend to embark upon.

Republicans appear unable to meet even basic governing obligations on their own. This will mean, at the very least, shelving campaign promises and long-term ideological objectives; most likely it will mean seeking help from Democrats. But this augurs disaster. Democrats rightly won’t cooperate with attempts to demolish their legacy, while everything we know about Trump—and about the empty promises Republicans made to their voters over the years—suggests the GOP will be loath to empower Democrats. Yet failure to do so will end in ruin for all of us.