Mr. Trump is not a detail person even in his more active days, but his natural instinct is to involve himself in the broad strokes. His often impulsive Twitter blasts can upend negotiations and shift the focus of events, sometimes at odds with the official position of his own White House. And so his relatively low profile in recent days has been striking.

Even some of his top advisers sounded surprisingly passive this week on different issues. Secretary of State Rex W. Tillerson said that Russia was already trying to interfere in the midterm congressional elections this year, but there was not much the United States could do to stop it. “If it’s their intention to interfere, they are going to find ways to do that,” he told Fox News. “We can take steps we can take, but this is something that, once they decide they are going to do it, it’s very difficult to pre-empt it.”

Vice President Mike Pence, who is in South Korea for the opening of the Olympics, likewise sounded relatively detached from the spending debate involving his former colleagues in Congress back home. Asked whether he had called any lawmakers, he said he had only talked with the White House unit that lobbies Congress. “I’ve been in touch with the legislative office and the president and I have talked frequently,” he told reporters, “but we’re on standby as the vote approaches.”

Other presidents have discovered that there can be benefits from staying on standby. When President Bill Clinton assigned Hillary Clinton to lead an effort to pass universal health care, she and a task force crafted a highly detailed plan that died on Capitol Hill. The lesson that Mr. Clinton and his successors took from that is that sometimes it is better to set a broad goal but let Congress figure out how it wants to proceed. President George W. Bush did that with his No Child Left Behind education program and President Barack Obama did that with health care and some spending fights.

But Mr. Trump has proved a divisive force so that even his broad direction is now sometimes ignored. Just this week he declared that he wanted Congress to let the government shut down rather than pass spending measures if there were no agreement on immigration. But Senate leaders of both parties disregarded him altogether and drafted their own deal without immigration.