Government shutdowns have consequences, though not always the ones their authors anticipate. Twenty years ago this week, we found out about one such unintended aftereffect: the affair between Bill Clinton and his former White House intern Monica Lewinsky, which began when he asked her to deliver him pizza during his 1995 showdown with the Republican Congress.

A full political generation later, we have no idea yet what may have happened behind closed doors at the Trump White House as a result of the federal government’s abrupt sixty-nine-hour closure this week. But it seems safe to say that the short-lived government shutdown of January, 2018, is unlikely to be long remembered, or even much debated, if only because the resolution of the fight was simply to postpone it for a mere two weeks.

The truth is that real deals are all but dead in Washington. The Great 2018 Kick-the-Can-Down-the-Road-on-Immigration-for-Two-More-Weeks Accord is further proof of it. And no one, not even “Art of the Deal” Donald Trump, can bring them back. In recent years, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and, now, Trump have all claimed to want to do big bipartisan deals, the kind that a President can pin a legacy on. Both Bush and Obama spent months in search of elusive “grand bargains,” in Bush’s case, one on entitlement reform; in Obama’s, on the federal deficit. They didn’t get them. Obamacare happened with Democratic votes alone. The Trump tax cut was purely a product of the Republican-controlled House and Senate. Most other “deals” that are touted as bipartisan breakthroughs recently have tended to be on measures that are not actually controversial, like imposing sanctions on Russia, or about legislation that would have been seen as a technocratic fix in a less polarized atmosphere, which is exactly how the immigration policy fight that triggered this week’s shutdown should have been treated.

In those rare cases where Democrats and Republicans have come together on a big issue in the last fifteen years, it has almost always been in the midst of genuine crisis, or when a major deadline (usually self-inflicted) looms. There is no other kind of deal that even seems possible today—at least one of the consequential variety that unites a large majority of both parties’ officeholders on an issue of national significance. By that standard, the last genuinely weighty bipartisan deals in Washington were arguably the bailout of the economy in the midst of the 2008 economic crisis and the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Can you imagine such a deal today? Of course not. The political incentives for any such agreements have been vaporized. And that was the case even before Trump, who, just a year into his Presidential term, has yet to make anything like the deals he promises on Twitter. If the past week’s shutdown fiasco made anything clear, it’s that Trump may no longer even be a serious participant in Congress’s halfhearted efforts to pass legislation on which both parties can agree. Embattled leaders on Capitol Hill don’t make it any easier, either: look at the criticism that Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, is taking for how he played his shutdown hand, or the toxic politics in the House of Representatives that make Speaker Paul Ryan appear to be a permanent captive of his Party’s hard-right Freedom Caucus. Before praising him this week, Trump had spent the previous few months in open warfare with Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, whom Trump and his former political strategist Steve Bannon have at times blamed for pretty much all of Washington’s problems.

“This Congress has been a governance disaster,” Senator Chris Murphy, a Democrat of Connecticut, told me on Tuesday. “We’re generally caught in a vicious Trump Catch-22, where Trump tells Congress to send him something and refuses to negotiate, and Republicans in Congress won’t vote for anything they don’t know Trump will support. It’s hard to get out of this vortex, where Trump won’t negotiate and Republicans won’t support anything Trump hasn’t negotiated.”

Murphy was joined by most of the Senate’s leading liberals, and all of its would-be Democratic Presidential candidates, in voting against the measure to reopen the government on Monday. And I heard Democrats on and off the Hill grumbling privately about how poorly they felt Schumer had played his hand. “It was never a possibility,” one of the Senate Democrats pointed out, “that Republicans were going to capitulate.”

Given the political realities, it couldn’t help but seem like overkill when a group of twenty-five Republican and Democratic senators shared celebratory smiles, backslaps, and raised plastic cups to each other to tout their success at ending the shutdown on Monday afternoon. The deal they were promoting managed to reopen the federal government only until February 8th, when yet another self-imposed crisis will hit, as funding for the government again runs out. Even the concession that the self-named Common Sense Coalition had secured from McConnell seemed nominal at best: a pledge “of sorts,” as one commentator put it, to consider an immigration measure to help the Dreamers, the young immigrants illegally brought to the U.S. as children, whose status has been uncertain since Trump, last fall, cancelled the Obama-era program giving them the legal right to live and work here.

Few were convinced that this pledge by McConnell represented much of a breakthrough, and Schumer was soon under fire for selling out the Dreamers. “How do we know the Senate isn’t screwing us?” Congresswoman Gwen Moore asked during an anxious House Democratic caucus meeting on Monday, after the Senate deal was announced, Politico reported. “They are,” Congressman Steny Hoyer, the House Democratic Whip, replied. By Tuesday, even McConnell wasn’t exactly talking as though his pledge was ironclad: he put out a statement saying merely that it was his “intent” to honor the deal. House Republican leaders told reporters that they did not consider themselves bound by it, while Trump, ending a weekend of near-silence, gleefully tweeted, “Schumer and Dems caved … gambled and lost.”

Even so, there were scenes of uncharacteristically bipartisan bonhomie on the Senate floor. At a cheerful photo-op, Susan Collins, the Maine Republican in whose office the deal had been brokered, showed off the rainbow-colored African “talking stick” that she used to keep order among the fractious senators who spent the weekend parlaying with each other. Press coverage of the centrists was, for the most part, glowing, and pointedly noted that they had stepped in after it became clear that Trump and party leaders on Capitol Hill couldn’t get the job done. “What I have seen here on the floor of the Senate in the last few days,” the Illinois Democrat Dick Durbin said, “is something we have not seen for years.”

Still, Murphy, the liberal senator who did not sign onto the deal, was skeptical when we talked the next day. “There is no reason to celebrate,” he said.

Murphy is right. To start, there is the idea of holding funding for the entire federal government hostage to an immigration-policy fight, which, although now a Washington practice employed by both parties, is still a pretty terrible idea, whatever you think of the merits of the Democrats’ case on the Dreamers. And even members of the Common Sense Coalition privately admitted that the new deal resolved nothing. “Don’t exaggerate this thing,” a senator who participated in the talks and asked not to be named told me on Tuesday. “All this was was a path forward. No one said this was a deal to resolve everything.”

Whether you call it a deal or merely a way out of the shutdown, the centrists in both parties and their critics seem to agree with Murphy on one key thing: that Trump was largely to blame for the current crisis. Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who had spent weeks coaxing the President into what he thought was an immigration deal only to have Trump blow it up during an Oval Office meeting, told reporters that negotiating with Trump’s White House was impossible. Jeff Flake, another Republican who joined the Collins coalition, also put the blame on the President. “What’s been difficult is dealing with the White House and not knowing where the President is,” Flake told reporters. “I don’t think it will change.”