Never mind that House Republicans had voted dozens of times — back when Barack Obama was president and the action was meaningless — to end Obamacare. Never mind that they have a remarkable majority, one created, in part, through their Obamacare opposition. They still couldn’t deliver.

That Trump isn’t good at follow-through comes as no surprise. Ryan’s miscalculations are the greater revelation. He knows Congress, purports to know policy and yet produced a wretched bill that smelled as bad to the more centrist members of his caucus as it did to the most conservative ones.

And he moved it to the front of the line, ahead of other initiatives, so that the public’s first glimpse of negotiations between the president and Congress in a government under a single party’s control was an ugly sight indeed.

For the two terms of the Obama presidency, Republicans in Congress perfected their posture as the party of no, becoming so comfortable in that role that they still seem somewhat baffled to find themselves in a new one.

And no isn’t enough, especially not when it comes to Obamacare, which has been around long enough to plant deep roots in American life. There’s no repealing without some replacing, and Republicans were so fixated on the first part of the equation that they never grappled adequately with the second.

Their limited preparation and lack of agreement would matter less if they had strong leadership in the White House. Instead they have Trump, who lashed out at Democrats and pretended that the collapse of the health care bill was some sort of perverse or eventual triumph. He’s thrashing around, looking for narratives that let him off the hook. CNN reported that he was upset that his daughter, Ivanka, and her husband, Jared Kushner, were away from Washington on a ski vacation in Aspen, Colo., during such a crucial time. Give him a few more days. He’ll come up with a scenario — or at least a tweet — that casts Rosie O’Donnell as the culprit.

Of course there has been murmuring from his advisers about how Ryan led them all astray, and it bodes ill for the Trump-Ryan relationship going forward.