The president had a change of heart Friday morning, shortly after Fox News host Pete Hegseth savaged the omnibus spending bill Donald Trump was about to sign as a “swamp budget” and a “Mitch McConnell special.” Most important, he exclaimed angrily, “There’s no wall!” Minutes later, Trump was threatening to veto legislation that he had already promised to endorse, setting off a bizarre spectacle in which the White House scrambled to convene a press conference to address the issue but—after aides told Trump he would be blamed for shutting down the government on a weekend when he was set to relax at Mar-a-Lago—the president ultimately relented, fulminating pointlessly before the press before heading off to sign the bill behind closed doors. (“Dare I call it a ‘fake news’ conference?” smirked Jake Tapper.)

Trump’s diehard voters—those who have dutifully supported him throughout his various failed attempts to build said wall—were not amused. “The bill PROHIBITS the president from building anything on the border other than sad, little pedestrian fences, like what we have now (and aren’t working),” Ann Coulter fumed when I asked about this most recent betrayal. “It PROHIBITS the president from building any barrier at all except in two regions—one where there already is a fence, but I guess he can repaint it. He cannot build any new barrier—even the sad, little fences—on more than 33 miles of the 2,000 mile border.”

On Friday night, as Trump settled in at his private Palm Beach club, Fox News cheerleader Sean Hannity struggled to work through his disappointment in a dejected prime-time monologue. “I personally wish the president vetoed this bill, made them stay in Washington. Make them keep their promises,” he sighed. “What happened to the Republican Party—whatever happened to the party that believed in fiscal responsibility?” He followed up with a prediction that the Republican Party had dug their own grave—“They will have nobody to blame but themselves if they lose. It won’t be Donald Trump’s fault”—and by the following week, the rest of Trump’s boosters had largely fallen into line.

“I can forgive Trump,” said Jim Hoft, the editor-in-chief of Gateway Pundit, a pro-Trump Web site that largely traffics in conspiracy theories and often rages against the Republicans of Capitol Hill. “I think there’s a lot of anger building up against the Republican Party and party leaders who have a completely different agenda than Trump when he ran. They’re certainly not doing anything to help him out. That’s upsetting.”

That, of course, didn’t excuse Trump entirely. “No other president would have signed such laughable restrictions on his power,” Coulter said. “Obama wouldn’t have signed it.” Nor was MAGA-world fully sold on Trump’s claim, during his pseudo-press conference, that he would never sign such a bill ever again. Breitbart, for one, tweeted a skulll emoji in an article about Trump’s promise. The conservative Washington Times, meanwhile, reported that far-right advocacy groups in D.C. had largely given up on the hope that Trump would veto anything. “[Whichever] party feels that it will have the upper hand in the 116th Congress will drag their feet to extract a better deal, which means it will be last-minute, up against a deadline,” said Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense. “At that time, President Trump should stick a fork in it and send it back. That said, I have little confidence that he will.”

The most hardline Trump supporters cast their blame elsewhere, perhaps out of desperation. “[John] Kelly should never have let the bill get to the president’s desk,” Jack Posobiec told me. “Did Marc Short decide to not do his job and push for the original White House budget?” Kurt Schlicter, a diehard Trump pundit, wrote at TownHall that he still had faith in Trump, days after the omnibus scrum had subsided. “[The] fact is that this was a screw-up that led to him being faced with two bad choices, and we need to see clearly what happened. We weren’t ‘betrayed.’ It’s not ‘over.’ And ‘Trump has totally lost my support’ is exactly what your enemies want you to say. Don’t say what your enemies want you to say.” Within days, they’d brought the blame around to Republican leaders: “The president and the people who voted for him have been betrayed by Speaker Paul Ryan and Leader Mitch McConnell,” Jeanine Pirro declared on her Saturday show on Fox News. “And the people in Kentucky and Wisconsin need to make sure these guys are defeated in the next election so this president can carry on the agenda that we elected him to do.”

Despite Trump’s various heresies, after all, he remains further to the right than his compatriots in Congress, particularly on the key issue of immigration. “It’s always a wild card with him, [but] I tend to trust Trump more than these House and Senate leaders, so I take his word above theirs anytime,” Hoft explained. Will Sommer, a campaign editor for The Hill who covers the various melodramas of the far-right in his RightRichter newsletter, explained that even if Trump wavers, his base has nowhere else to go. “In the short term they’ll be upset, but it’s not like these guys are going to abandon Trump over it,” he said. “Compromises like this might end up depressing G.O.P. midterm turnout somewhat, but again, it’s not like the wall would be more likely under a Democratic House.”