Not long after Speaker of the House Paul Ryan left the White House on Friday afternoon, he stood in front of reporters admitting defeat. He had just convinced President Donald Trump to pull their health care reform bill—a bill which he and Trump had spent the week guaranteeing Americans that the Republican party would pass. Repealing and replacing Obamacare is something the party had promised to get done for seven years. Only now, it had majorities in the House, the Senate, and, in official party identification, the White House, too.

But despite the political trifecta—and despite the fact that Ryan and Trump had spent the week cajoling various factions of House conservatives, carting in Chick-fil-A to the Freedom Caucus and ordering in stacks of pizza boxes and bags of Baked Lays to Ryan’s office on Capitol Hill for the Tuesday Group—the effort still failed. All the concessions, the threats of retaliation from the president, the pleading from Ryan ultimately didn’t garner enough votes for a mess of bill that had gone to mush with compromise. Ryan urged the president to pull the bill Friday afternoon, over lunch of chicken and twice-baked potatoes. On that the two agreed.

“Moving from an opposition party to a governing party comes with growing pains and, well, we’re feeling those growing pains today,” Ryan said at his subsequent press conference. “I will not sugarcoat this. This is a disappointing day for us. Doing big things is hard.”

What will make this harder going forward is the fact that the governing party is led by a president with no prior political experience who has not exactly presented a strong, steady set of political beliefs to guide the various factions into agreement. (He was once upon a time a pro-choice New York Democrat, after all.) In a revealing interview with The New York Times Magazine’s Robert Draper published Sunday as part of a larger piece about the president’s relationship with Congress, Trump showed little interest in the finer points of policy. Asked about economic nationalism—an ideology that is arguably responsible for his unexpected win—Trump offered few points of clarity. “Well, ‘nationalism’ — I define it as people who love the country and want it to do good,” he said. “I don’t see ‘nationalism’ as a bad word. I see it as a very positive word. It doesn’t mean we won’t trade with other countries.” When asked for more details about his promised infrastructure plan, Trump offered that “real work is going to be done on bridges and roads and airports and things that we’re supposed to be doing. So it’s not just a political piece of paper. We’re going to do infrastructure, and it’s going to be a very big thing.” Draper reported that Trump was easily distracted and more interested in discussing “fake news” reporters and his speech before the joint sessions of Congress last month: ”I certainly have gotten great reviews—even the people who hate me gave me the highest review.”

That the president was uninterested in fully articulating the moving pieces of an agenda he painted in broad strokes on the campaign trail is not to suggest that the White House is visionless. Chief White House strategist Stephen Bannon, a key architect of Trump’s agenda, was happy to expound on economic nationalism, a philosophy based on pushing trade deals, immigration reform, foreign policy, infrastructure spending, and jobs programs that breathe life back into the working class.

“The working class, and in particular the lower middle class, understands something that’s so obvious—which is that they’ve basically underwritten the rise of China. Their jobs, their raises, their retirement accounts have all fueled the private equity and venture capital that built China. Because China’s really built on investments and exports, right? People are smart enough to know that they’re getting played by both political parties,” Bannon told Draper. On infrastructure, he explained that “economic nationalism is predicated on a state-of-the-art infrastructure for the country, right? Broadband as good as Korea. Airports as good as China. Roads as good as Germany. A rail system as good as France. If you’re going to be a world-class power, you’ve got to have a world-class infrastructure.”