How Democrats Are Quietly Breaking Trump’s Grip

First Medicaid, now crypto—one defeat at a time, Trump’s machine is losing steam.

Since the start of this administration, Democrats have been cast as flailing, reactive, and hopelessly fractured. Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem have dined out on that image for months. But the reality is starting to shift.

Slowly. Quietly.

Things began to shift when the GOP tried to gut Medicaid in plain sight.

Republicans thought they could slip a budget framework through—one that set the stage to gut Medicaid—under the cover of bells and whistles. But Democrats didn’t just hold the line; they went on offense. They took the message out of D.C. and into the country: that the GOP was coming for the one healthcare guarantee nearly every American family depends on.

The country responded.

By the time Speaker Mike Johnson moved his budget framework in April, he knew the votes weren’t there to follow through on the Medicaid cuts. The GOP quietly folded, pivoted to tariffs as the core funding engine for their tax cuts. That pivot wasn't a sign of strength. It was a retreat.

And now, another brick in the wall just cracked.

Yesterday, the GOP’s much-hyped cryptocurrency legislation—the so-called GENIUS Act—collapsed on the Senate floor. Despite months of industry backing, media fluff, and bipartisan flirtation, it failed to clear a basic procedural vote. Just 49 senators backed it—short of the 60 needed. Democrats were unified. A handful of Republicans broke ranks.

Why does that matter?

Because this wasn’t just about stablecoins or financial plumbing. The bill was a power transfer—an effort to carve out a zone of deregulated finance, safe from federal oversight and full of shadowy loopholes.

“The only version of this bill that we have seen is one that the Republicans put out, and it has four major areas that are problems,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren told reporters ahead of the vote Thursday. She said it would “supercharge Donald Trump’s corruption,” put “national security at risk,” undercut consumer protection and run “a substantial risk of eventually blowing up the U.S. economy.”

For Democrats, blocking it was a rare but real assertion of leverage. It’s also a reminder that when Democrats stay unified, they can create the conditions for Republicans to break ranks.

Taken together, these defeats are adding up—and fast. Had the Medicaid gambit succeeded, the pressure to lean so hard into tariffs wouldn’t have existed. But it did, and the impact is now starting to spread. The backlash is already here. Trump’s approval rating has dropped sharply in recent weeks, and with it, the myth of his unbreakable grip on the GOP.

Republican senators, sensing the shifting political winds, are beginning to distance themselves from parts of the Trump agenda they once embraced without question. It’s not just principle—it’s political self-preservation. And it suggests something larger is at play: an opening to slow the authoritarian drift of this administration.

It’s a win. Let’s not be shy about saying it.