GOP donors: Hey, we paid for a nice show — what’s up with this circus?

Wealthy contributors who have provided hundreds of millions in crucial funding to Republican campaigns expressed frustration this week after the failure to repeal Obamacare — a major campaign promise reaffirmed for seven years — revealed a party unprepared to govern.

Depending on loyalties, donors spread the blame around for the demise of the American Health Care Act, the Republican proposal to replace former President Barack Obama’s signature healthcare law.

Some fingered President Trump for blowing the negotiations, others House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., for writing an unpopular bill, and still others the conservatives who coalesce as the House Freedom Caucus and refused, in the view of some, to compromise sufficiently.

But the GOP donor community’s main concern, notwithstanding a looming healthcare crisis that voters expect the party to address, is what the collapse of the AHCA portends.

If Congressional Republicans and the White House can’t agree on healthcare after years of promises and supposed preparation, equally politically complicated initiatives like tax reform are in trouble, and an opportunity to move Washington to the right after eight years of Obama could be squandered.

“If we can’t get anything done whatsoever we will pay a price in 2018, no question about it,” Fred Malek, a veteran Republican financier who serves on the board of the American Action Network, the political nonprofit aligned with House GOP leadership, said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.

Republican donors harbor many concerns after the fruitless healthcare effort.

Breaking a promise to the conservative base to repeal Obamacare worries them because it could diminish GOP turnout in 2018. With Democrats energized to hand Trump a defeat, the Republicans’ usual midterm advantage could be erased.

Donors also fret that Republicans are wasting a rare moment of full GOP control of Washington and the chance it offers to implement conservative reforms.

Trump can only do so much through executive power, and those achievements could be reversed with the stroke of a pen by a Democratic president. Real change requires legislating. Underlying this anxiety is the deeper concern.

The Republicans’ inability to compromise among themselves and get things done strikes donors as incompetence. They wonder if the party will be able to show any national leadership over the next four years. Some remain hopeful that the GOP learned a lesson from the outcome of the healthcare debate.

“It was a great wakeup call,” said Andrew Sabin, a Republican contributor from New York who was headed to Ryan’s weekend donor retreat in Florida. “I think, in the end, they all realize they have to fix it and they have to work as a team.”

Since Trump won the Republican presidential nomination last year, GOP donors have divided into different categories.

The include supporters of the president; reluctant backers who supported him as means to an end on policies like tax reform; and those who never embraced him but continue to write checks to Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Where they fit in those categories is determining who they are blaming now for the failed healthcare negotiations.

But regardless of who contributors are blaming, there is general agreement that one way or the other, Trump and Congressional Republicans need a win on taxes, even if that means scaling back their ambitious plans to overhaul the U.S. tax code.

“They simply do not understand why we cannot get anything done and look so completely disorganized,” a Republican fundraiser to advises GOP donors said, on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly. “It seems like folks are willing to give leadership another shot, but that is all.”

For that reason, and others, Malek, the veteran GOP moneyman, urged House Republicans to drop the border tax provision from their tax reform blueprint.

Ryan champions “border adjustability” as a means to bring fairness to the tax code and bolster the competitiveness of domestic manufacturers against foreign imports. Trump also has hinted at supporting the proposal, although he remains noncommittal.

But a handful of Senate Republicans from states where major retailers are headquartered are opposed. They include Trump allies like Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., and Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark.

If the issue sinks tax reform, the GOP donor community could begin to question whether it’s worth supporting the party in 2018. So might voters.

“We can’t afford to go down another path where there are not the votes there to succeed,” Malek said.