Several items on Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again agenda have suffered setback after setback in Congress as Republicans fight amongst themselves over policy details. Nearly nine months into the Trump administration, Obamacare remains intact, tax reform is in doubt, and an amnesty bill for undocumented immigrants who arrived as children is, shockingly, a legislative possibility. Much of the blame falls on Trump himself, whose leadership consists of making shiny promises and leaving the details to Capitol Hill for Congress to sort out. But at an R.N.C. donor event Tuesday, Nick Ayers, Mike Pence’s “sharp-elbowed” chief of staff, told a group of deep-pocketed G.O.P. donors that the hold-up was all Congress’s fault—or at least the fault of specific members of Congress who’ve opposed the president.

With the 2018 midterms looming, Ayers argued that, as a strategic move, donors should refuse to back candidates who buck Trump. “Just imagine the possibilities . . . if our entire party unifies behind him,” he said, according to an audio recording obtained by Politico. “If—and this sounds crass—we can purge the handful of people who continue to work to defeat him.”

Generally, any anti-Congress sentiment inside the Trump administration zeroes in on Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, whose repeated failures to pass meaningful bills have turned Trump against them. But Ayers suggested that anyone was fair game:

“I’m not speaking on behalf of the president or vice president when I say this,” Ayers responded. “But if I were you, I would not only stop donating, I would form a coalition of all the other major donors, and just say two things. We’re definitely not giving to you, number one. And number two, if you don’t have this done by Dec. 31, we’re going out, we’re recruiting opponents, we’re maxing out to their campaigns, and we’re funding super PACs to defeat all of you.”

The strategy promoted by Ayers—who Pence swears wasn’t brought on to firm up his own presidential credentials—seems like a long shot. To successfully “purge” the nonbelievers, donors would have to find a way to oppose Republicans across the ideological spectrum, from the moderate Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, to the piously conservative Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, even to the radical House Freedom Caucus, led by Mark Meadows. All of these Republicans have, at one point or another, tanked the Trump agenda. But the real message may have been in Ayers’s willingness to throw members of Congress—most of whom regard Pence as an ally within the Trump administration—under the bus. His doom-and-gloom predictions (“we’re on track to get shellacked next year”) might’ve been hyperbole, but his message was loud and clear: in the White House, animosity toward Congress is coming to a head.