But the intervention in Syria changed all of this with a bang, or 59 bangs. That Trump—who sent out a string of tweets in 2013 urging Obama to avoid launching missiles at Syria and declared during primary season that “we can’t be fighting Assad” and then who last night told Maria Bartiromo that Obama should have done what he had done—could make this move signaled a change not in degree but in kind.

Aside from Internet radio host Bill Mitchell, who represents the hardest and nuttiest core of Trump fandom, Trump’s deplorables appear to be in shock. Ann Coulter has been waxing wroth. So has Laura Ingraham. Pat Buchanan warns that “many of those who helped to nominate and elect him—to keep us out of unnecessary wars—may not be standing by him.” And, out on the fringe, the alt-right is enraged.

Now, the odds that Trump plans for an imminent escalation of force in Syria—something believed by Vladimir Putin, among others—are low, and not just because Trump vowed to Fox Business Network that “we’re not going into Syria.” (Trump’s word is of limited value.) It’s because he has come face to face with all the blowback. Trump doesn’t chart courses; he lurches. He hits one wall and then lurches toward another, hitting that one, like Austin Powers with his famous three-point turn. He first went for establishment nominees in filling his Cabinet, then hit the wall of resistance from his base and tacked back toward Bannon, then hit a wall of mainstream outrage over his travel ban, then lurched toward Reince Priebus and more stress on procedures, until he hit a wall with health-care overhaul, then lurched into an attack on Syria, running into a wall of outrage from his base and approval from all the wrong people. So he’ll probably lurch away from Syria, or try to. But acts of war have a momentum of their own, and for many of Trump’s deplorables, this was not a compromise but a betrayal.

All of this underscores the vulnerabilities of coming into the White House without policy experience or knowledge. Lurching is what happens when you’re dependent almost entirely on your advisers, with insufficient expertise of your own to help synthesize their divergent views. If you want to make a great meatloaf—a comparison made in honor of Mary Trump—you might take an oven temperature idea from chef A and spice idea from chef B, but you can only do that if you know how a stove works or how to peel an onion. Otherwise, you’ll have no idea how to mix and match the best of both and just go with recipe A, hoping your guy steers you right. Then, when chef A fails, you try chef B. Until chef B fails. This is the approach lots of us take when it comes to repairing our cars, which is bad enough in itself. It’s worse with a country.

Trump in desperation now seems to be contemplating scrapping his original supporters and finding new ones in the middle. The face of this new effort seems to be that of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who in the eyes of Trump’s deplorables has emerged as the chief villain and threat. Such a centrist course of action would be similar to that of Arnold Schwarzenegger after he ran into a wall as governor of California. But in Washington it would be Trump’s undoing. Trump’s only value to his fans is in his challenges to conventional wisdom. Take that away, and he’s just an incompetent version of John Kasich. Voters had the option of electing John Kasich, who’s much better than Trump at being John Kasich. With his new approach, therefore, Trump and his deplorables will go their separate ways. Unlike Trump’s previous divorces, however, this one doesn’t lead to a new spouse. It just leads to a lot of bad dates.

Video: The Shadow President Is on The Outs