When congressional Republicans pulled the American Health Care Act from the House floor last Friday, Philip Klein let it rip. The Washington Examiner’s managing editor tweeted that the demise of the GOP’s Obamacare alternative was a “massive embarrassment” for President Donald Trump. A few hours later, Klein fired off a devastating column calling it “the biggest broken promise in political history,” adding that “this episode shows that Trump and the GOP are perfect together—limited in attention span, all about big talk and identity politics, but uninterested in substance.”

“Failing to get the votes on one particular bill is one thing,” he wrote. “But failing and then walking away on seven years of promises is a pathetic abdication of duty. The Republican Party is a party without a purpose.”

Klein was right to be angry. A leading health care policy expert on the right, and the author of the 2015 book Overcoming Obamacare: Three Approaches to Reversing the Government Takeover of Health Care, he had spent years urging Republicans to find a consensus conservative replacement for the law—practically begging them to get down to the details. And last week, he watched the party implode in exactly the way he’d predicted: Undone by internal strife and a fundamental failure to think through policy specifics.

“It’s incredibly frustrating,” Klein told me this week. “I mean, I don’t want to get into an Oprah thing and make it about me and how I feel, but obviously it’s frustrating.”

For conservative health care wonks, the failure of the American Health Care Act wasn’t just a missed opportunity or a broken campaign promise or a political defeat. It was proof that the Republican Party’s seven-year pledge to replace Obamacare was almost entirely a political gambit.