This article is part of The D.C. Brief, TIME’s politics newsletter. Sign up here to get stories like this sent to your inbox.Chris Christie’s flight from Detroit landed in Newark, N.J., on Thursday and was one of the unlucky arrivals without a dedicated gate assignment. Tired and cranky, the former New Jersey Governor lumbered onto a bus ferrying passengers back to the terminal, where the woman seated beside him started unpacking the unpredictable state of politics, particularly President Donald Trump’s chaotic first few weeks back in power.[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]“She said, ‘You know, he’s really shaking things up, and maybe some of that will turn out OK,’” Christie recalled two days later at the Principles First Summit, a confab of traditionalist Republicans trying to chart their way through the next four years of Trumpism. “At that moment, when I’m at the end of my travel day, my Sicilian instinct is to grab her by the shoulders and go, ‘Are you kidding me?’”But Christie, who ran against Trump for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, ran afoul of his mercurial nature, and subsequently found himself exiled, listened politely before offering a self-aware question to her: “What about everything you’ve seen about him for the last 10 years leads you to believe that it might turn out OK?”In Christie’s telling, the woman in question said it was important for anyone in the presidency to succeed. Christie, uncharacteristically, was prepared to let the chat end there, but not his parable for an audience of hard-core NeverTrumpers, disaffected Republicans, and more than a few self-identified Democrats looking for answers in this charged period.“There’s going to come a moment where that woman, I believe in my heart, is going to say, ‘Yeah, no, this is not OK anymore,’” Christie said. “But we all get there at a different pace.”And then the former prosecutor summed up the ethos for that sold-out thinkfest held a few blocks from the White House back in Trump’s control.“To the extent that we try to force that pace because we can’t stand it anymore, we run the risk of lengthening it, not shortening it,” he said. “And a lot of damage could be done.”Welcome to the latest iteration of the Conservative Resistance. They are angry, they are motivated, and they are altogether at a loss at what to do with those feelings. This year’s Principles First summit, it’s fifth, offered its usual blend of anti-Trump fervor and pragmatic posturing about how to reclaim a Republican Party and conservative movement with which they once comfortably identified. On the same day that Trump regaled the more boisterous crowd just across the river at CPAC with his tales of political retribution, several hundred activists and insiders gathered in downtown D.C. to make sense of their current impotence.In the room, much of the rhetoric came off as scorching and inspired, as if a solution to the ongoing dismantling of much of the federal government were just over the horizon. Beyond the basement ballroom, though, it sure seemed lukewarm. It was a wait-it-out strategy that, frankly, is not entirely dissimilar to the approach Democrats are taking on their side of the observation deck. The path forward in no way matched the appetite for immediate action. It felt, at times, like being promised a decadent five-course meal and realizing later you had been served a rice cake.Dark humor and worries about democracy’s nadir frequently intersected in the basement of the J.W. Marriott. When former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales mused that maybe “Congress will say enough is enough,” the ballroom giggled with skepticism. Former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson similarly drew laughs when he suggested Congress will assert its check over the presidency: “I’m optimistic that they will at the right time. And it may be very, very soon.”Yet former Rep. Joe Walsh, a Tea Party founder from Illinois, said no one should count on the group he once counted himself a member to do their jobs: “Forget about Republicans in Congress. They’re done.”Billionaire entrepreneur Mark Cuban was similarly dismissive of those who thought wailing about Trump tearing down democracy would get the public on their side. “How’d that work in the campaign?” he needled.The gathering seemed simultaneously poisoned by pessimism and laden with pleas to give Trump time to reveal himself as a true threat to All Things American. The job of harnessing that outrage, the argument went, will get easier once Trump inevitably hands his critics a full dossier of second-term over-reach. As one introducer ticked through Trump’s foreign policy changes so far, he seemed out of breath by the end of the partial list. “That was in one month,” he said. “There are 47 months left.”But talk of waiting things out was constantly in tension with what many saw as an urgent moment in history that demanded action.“This is the collapse of an American ideal, American ideology, the American view of the world,” said Tom Nichols, a retired academic who now writes for The Atlantic. To his right on stage, one of the most recognized democracy advocates, chess grandmaster and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov, offered a polite correction. “We are not watching the collapse of the American ideal. We are watching the betrayal of the American ideal,” Kasparov said. “We are living in the middle of the coup.”As the day’s sessions neared its end, Sarah Longwell, a political strategist and publisher of The Bulwark, deadpanned, “This has been a long day and is terrifying,” before calling the President “a fabulist, a liar, and a bad person.” No one really objected to the verdict, but it was not apparent what to do with it. (Before the Summit closed out on Sunday, organizers announced they had received “a credible bomb threat” from someone claiming to be Enrique Tarrio, the former leader of the Proud Boys, forcing a temporary evacuation. Tarrio reportedly denied any involvement.)While adopting a resigned wait-it-out slouch, a running thread at the summit came down to a simple but actionable question: At what point has the United States entered into a constitutional crisis? Trump has been musing that he was not subject to court rulings, might serve a third term, and could start annexing the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland. Gonzales, who served as President George W. Bush’s top lawyer and ran his Justice Department, but endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris last year, said he is waiting to see if Trump ignores an inevitable setback from the courts. “Until that happens, we don’t have a constitutional crisis,” Gonzales said. Added Hutchinson, a former U.S. attorney: “We’re not there yet.” And Christie, another former U.S. attorney, said he, too, is concerned about the looming crisis, but warned that the language is being too casually bandied about.“I think we use this ‘constitutional crisis’ thing much too liberally,” Christie said. “What we’re doing is cheating, because when we really do have the constitutional crisis, half the country is going to go…” He then uttered a verbal shrug that could possibly be transcribed as “meh.”In the room, folks nodded along with a dour expectation that they too were going to be using that rhetoric at some point. It may just be as premature as it is inevitable. Patience is far from sexy, but it may be the best strategy to allow for Trump to trip over traps of his own making. Yet those most committed to restoring traditional conservative footing in the GOP are anxious to do more than stand by at this specific moment. “The resistance will rise,” said Bill Kristol, a self-described hawk who served as chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle. “But will it rise quickly enough?” In the crowd, there were visible shaking of heads.Make sense of what matters in Washington. Sign up for the D.C. Brief newsletter.