The nominal purpose of President-elect Donald Trump’s press conference on Wednesday, 168 days in the making, was to announce the disentanglement of his business interests from the public interest. By Tuesday evening—thanks to CNN’s careful but explosive reporting and BuzzFeed’s intemperate decision to publish an opposition research memo compiled by a former spy—it seemed Trump would also have to dispel questions about his vulnerability to foreign blackmail and illegal collaboration between his campaign and Moscow.

In the end, Trump did neither. He announced instead that his sons would run the family business, but that he would fire them if they lost money over the course of his presidency, and he left the lectern amid questions about his advisers’ connections to Russian officials. (Later, in a scrum with reporters after the spectacle was over, he would unconvincingly deny any Russia connections.)

While this was happening at Trump Tower in New York, Republicans in Washington were grappling with the challenge of vetting and confirming an unusually unqualified group of people to serve in Trump’s cabinet. Trump has also confronted GOP leaders with abandoning their “repeal and delay” plan to eliminate Obamacare, and in an aside Wednesday, revived his campaign pledge to use regulation and government purchasing power to bargain down the price of prescription drugs—a good idea most congressional Republicans vehemently oppose.

In just about every way, Trump’s pre-presidency has mirrored his erratic campaign, which saddled the Republican Party with scandal and simultaneously threatened to displace cornerstones of the conservative policy agenda. The reasons Republicans didn’t want Trump to win the GOP nomination—and why some privately hoped he’d lose—turned out to be well founded. He won the election despite these liabilities.

As we get deeper and deeper into the Trump era, it becomes harder and harder for skeptical Republicans to credibly distance themselves from him; their identities become further linked every day to a president who will take office with historically abysmal approval ratings. Their best hope for avoiding political and substantive pitfalls to come would be to take active steps to stop Trump from corrupting the U.S. government, or to impose doctrinaire conservative policy on him, or both.