Hoisting high the banner of “Trumpism without Trump,” Bannon pledged a “season of war” against the Republican establishment, and set about recruiting populist outsiders to challenge GOP incumbents in the 2018 primaries. By flooding Capitol Hill with Trumpian torchbearers, Bannon believed, he would empower the president to make good on campaign promises like building a border wall, while also changing the DNA of the Republican caucus. That he would make life more difficult for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was an added benefit.

Meanwhile, Bannon has begun to work on creating a political infrastructure for his ideological movement. In November, he announced the formation of a new group that would promote a nationalist approach to trade, immigration, and foreign policy. (The group has not yet formally launched.) He used Breitbart News to amplify allies, attack adversaries, and shape new political narratives, all while coaching a new generation of conservative journalists in his combative style. He even showed a willingness to reach out to center-left writers and intellectuals—such as The American Prospect’s Robert Kuttner, in the most notorious previous example of Bannon getting himself in trouble in an interview—perhaps believing that he could seduce them into joining the post-partisan populism he envisioned.

While many doubted Bannon’s sincerity—detractors have long dismissed him as a cynical opportunist—his project was not without precedent. When, half a century ago, the conservative movement began taking control of the Republican Party, it was largely thanks to a network of think tanks, pressure groups, magazines, and commentators who had spent years articulating and popularizing their ideas. Bannon seemed to recognize that without a similar foundation, the unorthodox brand of populist nationalism that Trump campaigned on would struggle to achieve its goals, and be uprooted from Republican politics the moment the president left office.

But with his kneecapping of Bannon Wednesday, the president made clear that Trump—and not Trumpism—was still the main event, and that any effort to take the spotlight away from the Oval Office would be met with a swift and severe punishment. Amid the fallout of this high-profile political divorce, the most urgent question may be who will retain control of Trump’s core base of supporters.

Ben Shapiro, a former Breitbart News editor-at-large who left the site in 2016 over his disagreements with management, said Bannon’s efforts to “graft a nationalist populist philosophy onto Trump” were always doomed to fail.

“Bannon was delusional,” he said. “There is no Trumpist movement, there is just Trump.”

Shapiro pointed to Breitbart’s own comments section—where hardcore fans were re-pledging allegiance to Trump on Wednesday afternoon and voicing their displeasure with Bannon—and said the president had little to fear from a potential backlash. “The White House has given conservatives more good policy in the past six weeks than they ever did when Bannon was there,” Shapiro said, citing the passage of the tax reform bill, the ongoing appointment of appellate court judges, and the declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. And while Shapiro has been an outspoken critic of Trump over the past two years, he said he was thrilled by the president’s statement disowning Bannon.