Assuming Donald Trump loses the election in November, we still don’t know how much power Republicans in Washington will be left with next year. There are conceivable scenarios in which they keep complete control of Congress, are wiped out altogether, or relinquish the Senate but maintain a brittle grip on the House of Representatives.

Though the ultimate distribution is unclear, we are discovering with some certainty how Republicans will use whatever power they have, and the emerging picture is bleak and infuriating.

The agenda that Republicans ran on, before the bottom fell out of the Trump campaign, was scattershot and inconsistent. Trump’s plans to ban Muslim travel and mass-deport immigrants have been contradicted by the Republican House speaker, the Republican vice presidential nominee, and even Trump himself at times. Speaker Paul Ryan’s plan to radically reorder and devolve the federal safety net likewise contains a number of elements that Trump at times seems to oppose.

Now that Trump appears destined to lose, Republicans are falling back on a general argument that anti-Trump Republicans and independents should vote for GOP office-seekers further down the ticket, to restrain Hillary Clinton when she’s president.

But a more accurate way to describe what they’re seeking is to hold together their broken party for long enough to make another run at complete control of government in 2020. Republicans are no longer seeking any substantive ends in the interim—just the power to obstruct and the power to manufacture scandal. And they will be aided in this effort by many of the same conservative intellectuals who have spent more than a year lamenting the rise of Donald Trump.