By the time Trump finally got involved, hosting rank-and-file members at a White House dinner Monday night, it was too late. As they supped, Senators Jerry Moran and Mike Lee announced they opposed the repeal-and-replace bill, dooming it.

That set Trump’s short fuse alight, producing a string of tweets that has continued ever since. First, he criticized congressional Republicans for trying to repeal and replace Obamacare simultaneously:

Republicans should just REPEAL failing ObamaCare now & work on a new Healthcare Plan that will start from a clean slate. Dems will join in! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 18, 2017

It’s an interesting idea. It’s also one that some Republicans wanted to pursue back at the beginning of the Trump administration, when the president labeled repeal his top priority. GOP leaders knew that it would be difficult, and perhaps impossible, to write a bill that would achieve all that Trump, and members, wanted to do—to drive drown premiums, reduce costs, and leave entitlements in place, all while repealing the individual mandate. Repeal alone would allow a moral victory and push the difficult reckoning off into the future.

But Trump wouldn’t have any of it. He pressured congressional leaders to do both repeal and replacement at the same time, and they acquiesced. GOP leaders must have read his tweet demanding pure repeal with bitter humor. But Senator Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gamely announced he’d move forward with a pure repeal bill, only for three members of his caucus to announce their opposition—too many for the bill to move forward.

Trump scolded Republicans during his conversation with Robertson last week.

“For years, they've been talking about repeal-replace, repeal-replace,” he said. “I think they passed it 61 times, repeal and replace, but that didn't mean anything because you had the minority, the Republicans, they didn't have the majority so it wasn't going to get to the president, but if it ever did, Obama wasn't going to sign it.”

Trump is on to something here. GOP leaders played a cynical game with voters for years after the Affordable Care Act passed, repeatedly holding votes to repeal Obamacare, knowing that they didn’t have anything resembling a plan that could actually replace the law, achieve what they said it would, and garner enough votes. Once in power, they were suddenly confronted with that failure.

In an unusually frank moment, but one that was damning about the way he and his colleagues had acted in past years, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said, “Look, I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win. I think most of my colleagues didn’t, so we didn’t expect to be in this situation.”

One might expect a candidate for president to have realized that before July, but Trump had even less interest in the health-care nitty gritty than most GOP senators. As it turned out, however, repeal alone does not appear to have enough votes among Senate Republicans to proceed either, despite Trump’s urging.