After Donald Trump addressed a joint session of Congress last month—a high-water mark for the president’s popularity with elite political pundits—conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks penned a piece titled “Trumpism at Its Best, Straight Up.” Brooks attempted to define Trump’s political philosophy as an “utter repudiation of modern conservatism,” which he defined as foreign policy hawkishness, social conservatism, and fiscal hawkishness. “For the last 40 years, the Republican Party has been a coalition of [these] three tendencies,” he wrote. “Trump rejected or ignored all of them.”

Six weeks later, this analysis looks positively quaint. Trump has reversed so many positions as to prove definitively that he’s guided by no ideology. A rebuke of hawkishness? Trump is dropping bombs left and right. Social conservatism? He appointed Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and is trying to defund Planned Parenthood. Fiscal hawkishness? His proposed budget is an unending series of savage cuts. On Wednesday, Trump reversed positions on Russia, China, NATO, and other policies that were central to the isolationist and populist campaign he ran last year.

No one should be surprised. “There is no wizard behind the curtain of Trumpism,” MTV News political writer Jane Coaston wrote in National Review on Tuesday, “and no governing ideology.” Trumpism was never a coherent worldview, much less a moral code that anchors the president. Trump is not so much flexible or unpredictable as rudderless, and that’s what makes him so scary. Prudence and pragmatism are political imperatives, but a complete ideological vacuum yields disorder and chaos. Trumpism is an appealing fiction because it promises predictability. It makes sense of the senseless; it suggests a plan.

National Review contributor Victor Davis Hanson wrote in January that in Trump “we can see a coherent worldview emerging, something different from both orthodox conservatism and liberalism”—a supposed combination of “tradition, populism, and American greatness.” (Indeed, American Greatness is the name of one of the pro-Trump publications trying to intellectualize his politics.) With Trump capitulating to conventional conservatism, though, talk of a consistent Trumpism looks increasingly misguided. The man who won the Republican nomination by bucking conservative orthodoxy is now proving the pull of the GOP is as strong as ever.

Before Trump even took office, there were those who predicted this transformation. In November, when the president-elect sat down with the New York Times editorial board, columnist Ross Douthat asked Trump about his ideological divergence from Republican Party: