A year into the Trump administration, the lawmaking process has fallen into a predictable pattern: Donald Trump decides he wants to achieve a vague goal, which he then kicks to the Republican-controlled Congress. The problem, as Mitch McConnell once put it, is that if the president has something specific in mind, he does not bother to share. “I’m looking for something that President Trump supports, and he has not yet indicated what measure he is willing to sign,” the Senate Majority Leader told reporters back in January. “As soon as we figure out what he is for, then I would be convinced that we were not just spinning our wheels.” At the time, McConnell was referring to negotiations around the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. But a month later, he may as well have been describing Trump’s foray into gun-control legislation, which threatens to veer equally off the rails.

Faced with the fury of teenage voters as well as a surprise wave of activism from the business community, Trump has told House Speaker Paul Ryan that he wants immediate action on gun control, Politico reports. But absent any details from the White House as to what that means, Republicans, left to their own devices, have inevitably begun to clash amongst themselves. Their first attempt at passing a narrow background-check bill called Fix N.I.C.S.—a bill co-authored by Majority Whip John Cornyn and Democrat gun-control advocate Chris Murphy that aims to improve records and information-sharing in the F.B.I.’s national system—faltered when Republican Mike Lee indicated he would vote against it, kneecapping its expedited consideration. Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also indicated he would not support it, frustrating Cornyn. “I’m for doing what’s achievable. If we want to get bogged down again, do nothing? To me that’s unacceptable,” Cornyn told Politico. McConnell, for his part, has not indicated how he would like to proceed, per Axios, though his fellow Republicans are urging him to bring Fix N.I.C.S. to the floor for debate and subject it to the amendment process. “We’re better off to deal with this than go on and worry about it the rest of the legislative year,” Senator Roy Blunt told Caitlin Owens.

Democrats, including Murphy himself, have said they would not vote for the bill unless it was included as part of a broader debate over comprehensive gun-control legislation. But that goal may be a pipe dream if Trump continues to dampen his party’s negotiating power with extremist proposals. The president’s most concrete suggestion thus far—arming “gun-adept” teachers—is so unpalatable to both conservatives and liberals that it could derail any sort of attempt at bipartisan negotiations, particularly as Trump seems alarmingly gung-ho about the prospect. “I want my schools protected just like I want my banks protected,” he told the press last week, outlining a horrifying plan wherein teachers would be incentivized to obtain concealed-carry permits. On Monday, as debate revved up on the Hill, Trump doubled down on this idea during a meeting with state governors, while declining to back any of the proposals winding their way through Congress—an action, several senators said, absolutely necessary to getting anything passed. “President Trump has to find a pathway that he feels comfortable with,” Democrat Senator Joe Manchin, who has proposed legislation requiring background checks for gun sales between private parties, told a West Virginia radio station on Monday.

So far, that pathway has entailed threatening to circumvent Congress if it fails to coalesce around a bill he finds appealing. Trump suggested on Monday that he would issue an executive order regulating bump-stock sales on his own: “I don’t care if Congress does it or not. I’m writing it out myself, O.K.?” On other measures, such as raising the age limit to purchase firearms, Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders told The Washington Post that he’ll wait to see what lawmakers come up with: “A final determination and legislative piece has not been determined on that front yet.” Trump’s wait-and-see approach is familiar by now, as is his penchant to absorb whatever those around him are saying, rather than spearheading the conversation himself. In a memorable exchange last week, Sanders told reporters that the president would engage in “conversations” to figure out how to curb mass shootings. “If he has to listen to a bunch people, if he doesn’t have ideas of his own, that would suggest he doesn’t have any ideas,” Fox News reporter John Roberts replied.

It’s a chicken-and-egg cycle that threatens to gridlock the gun-control debate before it takes off. With Trump unwilling (and, in all likelihood, unable) to proffer a concrete plan—or even an ideologically consistent interpretation of the Second Amendment—Republicans are, once again, in a holding pattern. As a senior Senate G.O.P. aide told Axios, “I don’t really consider this a solvable problem in the current environment.”