As House Republicans continue to push their harebrained Affordable Care Act repeal proposal with the all perplexing resoluteness of your dad ruining a road trip by refusing to stop for directions even though you all knew he was hopelessly lost, Shadow President Steve Bannon has thrown some extremely cold water on these best-laid plans, urging Trump to think hard about the electoral consequences before proceeding with wholesale repeal. Unfortunately for Bannon and company, it appears that they still have no earthly idea what to do instead.

Here's "President" Trump today, reportedly "exasperated" by the complexity of the task at hand:

"Now, I have to tell you, it's an unbelievably complex subject," he added. "Nobody knew health care could be so complicated."

Nobody knew! I like to imagine Trump asking his aides to print off the Affordable Care Act Wikipedia article for him to read, and then requesting the Simple English version when that proved to be too much, and then when that proved no less opaque, flying into a rage before letting off some steam with some good all-caps tweets. This Washington Post description of Trump's "ostensible" repeal plan as it stands today makes a very strong case for the development of a universal Dripping With Sarcasm font.

While leaving most of the detail work to lawmakers, top White House aides are divided on how dramatic an overhaul effort the party should pursue. And the biggest wild card remains the president himself, who has devoted only a modest amount of time to the grinding task of mastering health-care policy but has repeatedly suggested that his sweeping new plan is nearly complete.

It's perfectly reasonable for Shadow President Bannon to look at the electoral math and realize that eviscerating their base's access to healthcare isn't the brightest of ideas. The problem, though, is that the White House has yet to articulate any alternative path forward, and lots of very powerful people appear quite happy to advantage of this uncertainty. In addition to entertaining Paul Ryan's morally bankrupt scheme to steal from the poor and give to the elderly, the president recently met with Scott Walker, Rick Scott, and John Kasich—the unholy trinity of Republican governors who will never be president—to hear out their probably-horrific reform proposals. Trump's giddy, awed reaction to Kasich's pitch makes him sound like your one coworker who somehow just discovered The Dress, and is delighted by it.