But the Republican caucus remains as factious as ever. It is the same GOP that ran 17 candidates for the presidential nomination, unable to agree on any of them and then unhappily settling for Trump.

Take, for instance, all the talk about Republican unity. Before the election, House Speaker Paul Ryan regularly pointed to the divided government in Washington - a Congress controlled by Republicans and a White House controlled by Democrats - as the cause of Washington deadlock. "The big things - poverty, the debt crisis, the economy, health care - these things are stuck in divided government," he said a week before the election. A week later, the problem was solved. "Welcome," he told his caucus, "to the dawn of a new unified Republican government."

With control of both houses of Congress and the White House, that's changed. In the two months that Trump has been in office, reality has been an intrusive presence. Trump's travel ban has twice slammed into constitutional constraints, knocked down by federal courts. The AHCA debacle shows that the same process is happening in the Congress, where reality is giving the lie to years of rhetoric.

In their years practising politics-by-obstruction, the GOP had little reason to distinguish between rhetoric and reality. Passing dead-on-arrival healthcare repeals, endlessly investigating non-scandals like Benghazi, grandstanding about tax reform and foreign policy and border walls - that kind of politics was easy. Fun, even.

As the AHCA debacle shows, the government remains divided. And while it's tempting to blame Trump, a political neophyte, the problems here are almost entirely within the Congress.

The bill's failure also shows how wedded the GOP had grown to its own false narrative about the passage of the Affordable Care Act. For seven years Republicans have decried Obamacare as a bill rammed down the throats of the American people, hastily cobbled together and passed in the dead of night, with no attempt to win Republican support. They have likewise insisted that the program is in a death spiral, making immediate repeal the only option.

None of this is true. Healthcare reform, the central policy of Obama's 2008 campaign, had been openly and endlessly debated. It took more than a year to pass through Congress, a process involving countless meetings with Republicans in an attempt to bring them into the negotiations. And the program, while it needs some alterations, is hardly in a death spiral.

The mythology of a crashing system that had been constructed on the fly fed into the GOP's own repeal plan, which actually was developed that way. Less than three weeks passed between the bill's introduction and its withdrawal, with major changes introduced less than a day before the vote was to be held.

For seven years, the Republicans have insisted that Obamacare was a serious threat to Americans' health, freedom, and security. Now, after one scandalously quick attempt to repeal it, they are moving on, suggesting that maybe they were more interested in the politics than the policy of repeal. Given that, it may be easier to understand how a flimflam man with big promises and no plans managed to take over the party. He fits right in.