Donald Trump may be dividing the country and attacking members of his own party, but Republicans still need him to sign a tax-reform bill—the light at the end of the dark Trump tunnel. Cutting taxes is critical for Trump, too: Wall Street and G.O.P. donors may be able to forgive his failure to repeal Obamacare (and its 3.8 percent tax on investment income), but not overhauling the tax code would be an unpardonable sin.

With that in mind, one might have expected the White House to have provided an update by now on the one-page, double-spaced, bullet-point tax “plan” it released in April, which might as well have simply read “tax cuts!” over and over again in 16-point font. After all, then-Press Secretary Sean Spicer said last month that the administration would be dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on a bill in September. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, too, insisted that September would see Team Trump releasing “a full-blown” plan. Instead, the administration seems to have given up on its own bill entirely.

Politico reports that despite Donald Trump desperately needing to score a legislative win, the White House is not expected to “release its own version of a tax-reform plan and will instead leave that to congressional leadership and the major tax-writing committees.” Naturally, the West Wing is now claiming it never said any of the things it is on the record as having publicly said:

There are a few reasons Team Trump might want to let Congress take the lead on this one. For one, the president doesn’t care much about policy details and has been distracted with more entertaining diversions, like picking fights with half the Republican leadership in the Senate, announcing a troop surge in Afghanistan, threatening to shut down the government if Congress doesn’t fund his border wall, and giving neo-Nazis cover for the violence in Charlottesville. “It’s utterly inexplicable,” Michael Steel, a Republican communications veteran, told Politico. A House G.O.P. aide was slightly less charitable: “Doing anything other than the f***ing Charlottesville equivocating would be lovely.”

Still, the president may figure he has good reason to keep riling up his base at campaign rallies and leaving self-proclaimed wonks like Paul Ryan to sweat the details. In addition to having the attention span of a gnat on speed, Trump’s disinterest in the tax-reform debate could insulate him if the effort fails, while still allowing him to take credit if it succeeds. Per The Washington Post: