On Friday afternoon, hours before the government was due to shut down, the President invited Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, to the White House for a cheeseburger. Over lunch in a small study next to the Oval Office, the two reached what Schumer later described as a deal to keep the government running—in exchange for an increase in defense spending, and massive funding for a border wall, the President would grant legal status to those immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, known as Dreamers. According to a person with knowledge of the meeting, Stephen Miller, the President’s thirty-two-year-old senior adviser, was seen lurking outside during the talks. After Schumer left, John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, told Trump that the deal was too soft on immigrants. Within hours, it was scuttled. “Whoever has access to the President last—that’s what sticks,” a second person close to the White House told me.

As the shutdown continues through its second day, members of both parties remain confused about what the President personally thinks. Dealing with Trump, Schumer said this weekend, is “like negotiating with Jell-O.” Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who tried, for months, to bring the President around on an immigration deal, has complained that there are “two Trumps.” One, the self-described “dealmaker,” likes the idea of brokering an agreement that eluded Barack Obama; the other is recalcitrant and contemptuous. If the shutdown has clarified anything, it may be that “two Trumps” actually amount to three people—the President and two of his main advisers, Miller and Kelly, who now appear to be driving the negotiations.

On January 9th, the President summoned members of both parties to the White House for a free-wheeling discussion about a deal to replace a popular Obama-era policy called DACA, which shielded seven hundred thousand Dreamers from deportation and granted them work authorization. (Trump cancelled DACA in September, then called on Congress to devise a substitute policy.) After fifty-five minutes, reporters, who had been invited in to record the talks, left the room, and the conversation continued, according to the Washington Post. Kirstjen Nielsen, the newly confirmed Secretary of Homeland Security and Kelly’s former deputy, distributed a four-page memo outlining the White House’s position on “must-haves” for a deal. The document caught Trump by surprise. “I don’t know what this is,” he said, as the Times reported. He then told the congressmen in attendance to discard the memo.

Two days later, the President invited Lindsey Graham and his Democratic counterpart, Dick Durbin, to the White House, after they informed him, at 10 A.M. that morning, that a bipartisan group of senators had reached an agreement. By the time they arrived, around noon, the President had changed his mind. He blasted the deal and demanded to know why the U.S. had to accept “all these people from shithole countries.” Graham later asked Nielsen, “What happened between ten and twelve?” He blamed the White House staff for giving Trump “really bad advice,” adding, later, that “as long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere.” According to a source close to the White House, Miller and Kelly were the ones who whipped Trump up before Graham and Durbin arrived.

Late last week, the news site Axios published a leaked White House memo drafted in response to the deal announced by Durbin and Graham and supported by at least five other Senate Republicans. The “proposal would cripple border security and expand chain migration,” the document read. The logic of the memo, which seemed hostile to the very idea of a Dreamer deal in the first place, reiterated positions that Miller has been pushing since October, even as Trump continued to embrace Dreamers publicly.

It also aligned with a hard-line bill introduced in the House by the Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Goodlatte proposes a twenty-five-per-cent reduction in legal immigration to the U.S., seeks to establish criminal penalties for all undocumented immigrants living in the U.S., and threatens to undo temporary protections for Dreamers in the event that their annual incomes drop below a certain level. There are other, more moderate proposals in the House and the Senate, with broad bipartisan support, but Trump’s waffling has emboldened conservatives, who now appear to be coalescing around Goodlatte. Kamal Essaheb, the policy director of the National Immigration Law Center, told me, “It’s not clear what Trump is negotiating for, or if he’s really the one negotiating. Does he want the wall? Does he want cuts to legal immigration? Does he want more resources for immigration enforcement? No one knows. Either he keeps changing his mind, or he keeps getting overruled by his own staff.”

While Republicans and Democrats have traded recriminations all weekend about who was responsible for the shutdown, Trump has been cloistered in the White House, watching himself on television and following the advice of aides to do less, not more, according to the Times. But Trump is the central player in the immigration deadlock—after his dramatic calls for an agreement on Dreamers, he has twice rejected offers to avert the current crisis. He refuses to take the blame, and yet he is also bitterly resentful of the idea that he isn’t in control.

In an interview that added to the confusion, John Kelly told Fox News, earlier this week, that Trump “has evolved in the way he looks at things,” and that the President’s obsession with the border wall was, perhaps, ill-advised from the start. “He’s changed his attitude towards the DACA issue and even the wall,” Kelly said. Feeling undermined, Trump quickly reiterated his support for the wall on Twitter and groused to his aides. Miller hasn’t yet been openly at odds with the President. His political future, like that of anyone in Trump’s White House, depends on his discretion. For months, Miller has been forcefully articulating the Administration’s positions on immigration in conversations with lawmakers and journalists. But it’s always been behind the scenes—Miller is careful not to seem like the one calling the shots. He repeatedly called Trump a “political genius” in a recent, contentious interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper.

The beginning of the end of Stephen Bannon, some say, was the Time magazine cover calling him “The Great Manipulator.” That label seems like an increasingly apt description of Kelly and Miller, too. It may be a matter of time before Trump realizes it. On Sunday, a bipartisan group of twenty senators worked away at a compromise to keep the government funded for three more weeks in the absence of an agreement over an immigration deal. It’s far from clear, though, what this might mean. Schumer said, on Sunday, that “only Trump” can end the shutdown. But, with the President’s own views a mystery, the chaos will continue.