As congressional Republicans struggle to cobble together a bill to replace ObamaCare, their party’s leader has been less than helpful. More often than not, in fact, the president’s comments seem calibrated to provide him with the maximum political benefit even if they undermine the Republican effort to repeal and replace Barack Obama’s health-care reform law. Well, turnabout is fair play. If Republicans were once reluctant to undermine the president by name and on the record, they are shedding their inhibitions.

As if the process of reshaping the nation’s sprawling health-care sector wasn’t hard enough, Donald Trump has spent his presidency making himself an obstacle to conservative reform. He undercut the House GOP’s efforts by calling the draft they produced at the cost of much political capital and factional comity “mean.” He insisted that the bill needed “more heart,” by which he said he meant “more money.”

The president may be a political novice, but he’s a savvy operator. Trump seems to have determined that it was in his best interests to let congressional Republicans pilot the ship while criticizing their driving from the backseat.

Trump’s latest display of apparent disinterest in the GOP’s central governing plank occurred yesterday, ironically, in a setting designed to communicate to Republicans just how plugged into the process he was. “We’re getting very close, but for the country, we have to have health care, and it can’t be ObamaCare, which is melting down,” Trump told the Senate Republican conference at a White House summit on the reform process. “This will be great if we get it done. And, if we don’t get it done, it’s just going to be something that we’re not going to like. And that’s okay, and I understand that.”

There’s a lot to unpack in that contradictory cascade of raw inner monologue. Even if the president thought he was giving the troops a rousing pep talk, observers came to the precise opposite interpretation.  It’s hard to avoid concluding from this word cloud that the president is entertaining the prospect of not just the Senate bill failing but the entire repeal-and-replace effort.

For Republicans, that’s an unacceptable outcome. Not only does the party have to make good on eight years of previous promises to their voters, but the party’s entire legislative agenda hinges on freeing up billions of dollars currently dedicated to ObamaCare provisions.

At some point, someone had to have informed the president that his agenda and, thus, his presidency rested on this fulcrum. It’s hard to explain his actions other than to attribute them to a self-preservation instinct. Well, two can play at that game.

In a recent Washington Post dispatch, Senator Susan Collins offered a subtle but scathing attack on the president’s competence. “This president is the first president in our history who has neither political nor military experience, and thus it has been a challenge to him to learn how to interact with Congress and learn how to push his agenda better,” she said. When asked, Republicans ranging from Lindsey Graham to Darrell Issa to Carlos Curbelo all dismissed the idea that the president could exact retribution against lawmakers who crossed him.

“In private conversations on Capitol Hill, Trump is often not taken seriously,” the Post revealed. “They are quick to point out how little command he demonstrates of policy. And they have come to regard some of his threats as empty, concluding that crossing the president poses little danger.”

“It is frustrating to deal with a WH that is not 100 percent accurate,” Senator Dean Heller told a caller into his Tuesday night tele-town hall. An early opponent of the Senate GOP’s draft health care bill, Heller drew friendly fire from a pro-Trump outside group that began targeting his home-state support in negative ads. Those ads were mysteriously pulled on Tuesday following the revelation that the Nevada senator was ready to go back to the negotiating table on health care, but Heller’s declarations of no-confidence in the president have not abated.

According to two Republicans who spoke to the New York Times, those attacks on Heller were dubbed “beyond stupid” and unhelpful by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a phone call to White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus. The Majority Leader is similarly disinclined to prop up the president. “When asked by reporters clustered on the blacktop outside the West Wing if Mr. Trump had command of the details of the negotiations, Mr. McConnell ignored the question and smiled blandly,” the Times reported.

This is what a party operating without conventional leadership looks like. It is the responsibility of any president to manage competing interests within and outside his governing coalition. Donald Trump appears to have prioritized his own interests and his own position over even those of his allies. Trump is not owed the loyalty of his fellow Republicans in Congress. To the extent Trump enjoyed a honeymoon, it’s over. The grace period has expired. If the GOP doesn’t start rowing in the same direction and soon, the New Republican Era will be remembered only for its dysfunction and transience.