This week, Donald Trump and his administration took the world on a policy roller coaster. Would the United States pull out of the North American Free Trade Agreement? Renegotiate it? As his Harvard-educated son-in-law, Jared Kushner, advised him, “Look, there’s pluses and minuses to doing it,” Kushner said he told the president, and “either way he would have ended up in a good place.” In other words: no big deal! And so Trump, who does not appear to hold a great many convictions, flip-flopped in nearly every possible direction.

Despite everything we know about him, the tick-tock of the president’s decision-making process (or lack thereof) is still stunning. During the whole of his campaign and into his first couple of months in office, Trump railed against NAFTA, describing it as the “worst deal” ever and vowing to scrap it as soon as possible. Then in early April, as the “globalist“ forces in the White House gained power, reports circulated that, actually, Trump was simply going to renegotiate the deal with Mexico and Canada. Then, all of the sudden, the populist faction within the West Wing appeared suddenly ascendant: on Wednesday, numerous news outlets reported that the White House was preparing an executive order with the intention of pulling out of the deal. Or it was until about 12 hours later, when Trump announced that the Mexican president and Canadian prime minister had politely asked him to renegotiate, and since Trump said he really likes those two countries, he said O.K.

How did we get here? According to Reuters, Trump really was prepared to nuke the deal. More than prepared, he apparently was giddy as a clementine-colored clam at the prospect:

“You know I was really ready and psyched to terminate NAFTA,“ Trump said. He decided that it would be better to terminate the trade deal after hearing about Wisconsin farmers’ struggles with new Canadian dairy rules that were shutting out their milk protein exports. “You saw that, you wrote about it,” Trump said. “And I said I’ve had it. I’ve had it.”

But then, per The Washington Post:

As news of the president’s plan reached Ottawa and Mexico City in the middle of the week and rattled the markets and Congress, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, and others huddled in meetings with Trump, urging him not to sign a document triggering a U.S. withdrawal from NAFTA. Perdue even brought along a prop to the Oval Office: a map of the United States that illustrated the areas that would be hardest hit, particularly from agriculture and manufacturing losses, and highlighting that many of those states and counties were “Trump country” communities that had voted for the president last November.

And, of course, the best way to convince Donald Trump to do something—even better than showing him maps, which he loves—is to appeal to his ego.

“It shows that I do have a very big farmer base, which is good,” Trump told the Post. “They like Trump, but I like them, and I’m going to help them.”