Yes, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and other U.S. stock markets, are still enjoying some uncontrollable exuberance in the wake of Donald Trump’s unexpected electoral victory. And, yes, Trump’s Washington is now teeming with former Wall Street bankers, especially with those who just happened to have Goldman Sachs on their resume. And, yes, Trump can’t seem to get enough of the political theater surrounding the countless corporate C.E.O.s, who once rolled their eyes at him and are now ferrying to Washington to kiss his ring. But make no mistake about it: the hand wringing about Trump’s presidency has started on Wall Street.

In the intervening months since November, Wall Street has largely been enamored of Trump, or at least the idea of how he could help them. Conversations around his ineptitude and sanity have generally been leavened by a sense that he would be an asset to the people who make money from money. “For the first time in—I don’t know, certainly post-crisis, maybe even longer—the prospect of actually having really pro-business policies is there,” one senior Wall Street executive told me. “I think that overrides a lot of the tweeting.” This person was referring to Trump’s avowed promises to lower corporate and individual taxes, deregulate much of the manufacturing and financial sectors of the economy, repatriate trillions of overseas corporate profits, and undertake a $1 trillion infrastructure program.

More recently, however, the conversation has turned to whether Trump’s early stumbles, and the tenuous nature of the political coalitions in Washington, will obviate his agenda. Last week, Goldman Sachs itself convened an internal forum about the very topic. Jake Siewert, Goldman’s global head of corporate communications, spoke with Michael Paese, the co-head of Goldman’s Office of Government Affairs, and Alec Phillips, the firm’s U.S. political economist. Paese said that many of Goldman’s clients, especially those outside the United States, were “trying to understand the Trump phenomenon” (we all are, Michael . . . ) and how they should compute “rhetoric versus reality.” Paese said that the Trump administration has been surprisingly “slow out of the gate” to “control the bureaucracy” and to “set policy.” He noted that by this time in 2009, the Obama administration had already passed legislation regarding the second tranche of the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, the $850 billion stimulus program, as well as the beginnings of Obamacare and cap and trade. “The ability for this administration to not only control the bureaucracy but set policy is more limited based on the slow pace,” he said. “And I think that’s affecting the ability to match rhetoric with policy and get it done sort of right in the first instance.”

Noting the fissures within the pugilistic Republicans on Capitol Hill, Paese also observed that Trump is finding it much more difficult than he anticipated to repeal and to replace Obamacare. He compared it to the old story of the dog that finally caught the car: “The Republicans had been running for a long time on repealing it, but replacing it is difficult.” In the end, Paese explained that Trump’s deregulation plans have already become the victim of the health-care imbroglio, and the president’s perplexing inability to finish staffing his government. “Personnel is policy,” he said.

For his part, Phillips was slightly more sanguine. He said he thinks there will be a corporate tax-rate cut coming. He predicted that it would fall from 35 percent to 25 percent, but not down to the 15 percent rate that Trump promised when he was a candidate. He seemed less sure about whether a personal income tax cut would make it through Congress. But, he cautioned, tax cuts—whether corporate or individual—have been pushed further down the legislative agenda, too. “It’s clearly a 2018 tax cut,” he said. “Maybe it gets enacted by the end of this year, but it’s going to be mainly a 2018 thing. Who knows? It could be a 2018/2019 story ultimately.”