When he won the Oval Office last year, President Joe Biden promised to govern by consensus and unite the country.

Since then, the country has watched him fail to bring together the disparate wings of his own party around ambitious tax and spending plans that would force the wealthy to shoulder more of the burden for social programs. And that was after abandoning any hope of getting a bipartisan agreement that would demonstrate Washington’s ability to come together.

The shift from consensus to partisanship means that when Biden and his aides now mention compromise, they aren’t referring to bipartisanship. They’re talking only about the factions of their own party…

“The longer it takes, the messier it looks,” Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary under President Barack Obama, told NBC’s Craig Melvin.