Banks, a straitlaced 37-year-old former state legislator, wore a blue-and-brown plaid blazer and a Fitbit on one wrist. His short, nut-brown hair was lacquered sharply back from his forehead. Thinking some more about the matter at hand, he settled on two potential explanations. “It’s either that he’s authentic and fat-fingered a tweet, or that he’s unserious about how he communicates,” Banks said. Between the two alternatives, he declined to choose.

A first-term back-bencher from a safe Republican district, Banks is not exactly the Great GOP Hope. To the extent he is regarded at all in Washington, it is as a serious but not particularly flamboyant up-and-comer. A self-described movement conservative and protégé of the irreverent Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, Banks voted for Trump “with reservations.” He disagrees with Trump on issues like foreign policy, trade, and fiscal policy, to name a few, but he voted for the president’s health-care bill, describing it as a step in the right direction.

He is, in other words, a fairly ordinary Republican congressman, trying to find his way in Washington in not-so-ordinary times.

On the other hand, it is his first term, so who is he to say this isn’t normal? “I don’t know the difference, really,” he told me at one point. “You could have told me it was just like this a year ago, and I would have believed you.”

During the day we spent traveling his district recently, Banks was frank with me about the challenge this poses. Six months into a job he had every reason to expect would consist mostly of opposition to the party in power, he has been protested by the liberal Resistance, and he has been yelled at by members of his own party who want him to be more pro-Trump. Given that 70 percent of his district voted for Trump in November, though, it is more often the latter.

“I don’t work for the president,” Banks told me. “Where were we, Paul, last week, when I was lambasted on that subject of whether or not I was going to blindly follow the president?”

From the front seat, Banks’s district director, Paul Lagemann, reminded him that it was a meeting of the Allen County Republican Party where he’d asserted his independence. Some in the room, Banks said, “felt that was maybe an act of disloyalty,” while others agreed with his stance.

“I’m trying to navigate it,” he said. “I’m trying to figure out how to navigate that tightrope. I’m choosing to approach my job by maintaining my independence, and maybe I’ll be defeated for doing so. But I also look into the future—I’m 37 years old, and I intend to be around in the post-Trump era, to continue to be a player in the conservative movement.”

I asked Banks if he believed there would still be a conservative movement post-Trump. “I believe that there will be,” he said.

In Angola, Indiana, where a quaint downtown of mom-and-pop stores wraps around a central traffic circle, Banks stopped at Sutton’s Deli to chat with the owner, John Sutton, a tall, buzz-cut man who emerged from the kitchen wearing a white apron. They talked in front of the ice-cream case, next to a poster of Lady Liberty and a bald eagle.