“I think it is probable that Donald Trump will not be the Republican nominee,” Eric O’Keefe, a Wisconsin conservative operative who co-founded Delegates Unbound, told me on Wednesday, sitting in a mostly bare, recently rented office suite on the 16th floor of a downtown Cleveland office building.

“There are a lot of delegates who don’t want to vote for Trump,” O’Keefe, a slender man with a mop of gray-white hair, told me evenly. “That’s why we’re here.”

The scenario sketched out by O’Keefe and his fellow Republican rebels—a ragtag band of misfits and gadflies, with competing agendas and no clear endgame—wasn’t just farfetched. It was a fantasy. And 36 hours later, it would fizzle in dramatic fashion, as the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign teamed up to squelch it definitively, despite a Republican senator’s dramatic last-minute appeal to his fellow partisans’ conscience. By Friday morning, Trump would be publicly gloating about having “crushed” the delegate revolt, and the GOP’s submission to its conqueror would be complete.

The push to topple Trump, it turned out, was a paper tiger, a few loud but lonely voices who never stood much of a chance in a party temperamentally inclined not to rock the boat. (Some members of the media who had spent the week hyping the effort grumbled afterward about feeling burned by the rebels’ grandiose and, it turned out, unsubstantiated claims.) Considering the powerful force of partisanship and the uncertain and unprecedented nature of their efforts, it’s impressive they got as far as they did: an office, flights of television ads, more than a dozen volunteers frantically strategizing and whipping delegate votes.

But as the effort went down in flames, it revealed a Republican Party that, although still chaotically divided, has largely decided, having bought the Trump ticket, to take the ride.

A meeting of the Republican National Convention Committee on Rules and Order of Business is not typically thrillsville, but bear with me here, because this was an unusually dramatic meeting of the Committee on Rules and Order of Business. It began on Thursday morning, ominously, with a printer jam.

The ostensible printer jam led to a one-hour delay, then a four-hour delay. Soon word leaked out that the printer jam was a ruse to cover for a secret meeting between the activist delegates, their allies, and the Republican National Committee, which has considered Trump the nominee for months now and whose priority is to create for television audiences an orderly show of a convention, similar to years past, with the nominee smoothly coronated and celebrated as the balloons fall from the ceiling.

(Later, officials insisted there had indeed been a printer jam, but admitted it was not the reason for the long delay.)

Behind closed doors, in a conference room up an escalator from the convention-center basement where the committee was to meet, the negotiators huddled. The rebels’ key figures included Ken Cuccinelli, the former attorney general of Virginia; Kendal Unruh, a schoolteacher and delegate from Colorado; and U.S. Senator Mike Lee of Utah.