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Successful politicians manage to control the narrative. In 2024, for example, Donald Trump and the GOP, with a helping hand from right-wing news outlets, managed to make the election about immigrants and the high cost of living. As it turns out, Americans cared more about those things than the threat to democracy that Trump posed.

Conversely, now that Republicans are in full control of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court, they’d rather not talk about rising prices anymore (apart from the president telling the occasional lie about there being no inflation) because they are the ones getting blamed for them.

Being able to control the narrative is perhaps Trump’s greatest political skill. For a decade, he has shown an uncanny ability to get his supporters and the media to focus on what he wants.

That is becoming increasingly difficult these days.

The economy, for example, used to be one of Trump’s strongest issues as a candidate. As president, it is not. His net approval on the economy overall is -16 points, and on inflation and high prices, it’s -29 points.

In fact, his approval rating on most issues is underwater now.

But not on crime. A recent poll shows that Americans believe that Republicans have a better plan to protect them from criminals than Democrats.

And that is one of the reasons why crime became a focal point for the GOP. The other is that, even though they control all levers of the federal government, Republicans can blame Democratic mayors and governors for the supposedly rampant crime in “blue” cities and states.

As a result, because they are always happy to do Trump’s bidding, Fox News and other right-wing news outlets focused a lot on crime in recent weeks, e.g., the case of a young Ukrainian woman being murdered on a commuter train in North Carolina.

The government shutdown has changed that.

It has turned the nation’s focus to health care and what Americans have to pay for it, and that is a terrible issue for Trump and the GOP.

Republicans felt that they could make the shutdown narrative about Democrats wanting to spend more than $1 trillion and give health care to illegal immigrants.

Conversely, Democrats wanted to talk about the skyrocketing premiums that millions of Americans were about to face as a result of the megabill that the GOP passed earlier this year.

And, for once, they are winning.

The shutdown has put a spotlight on the Affordable Care Act tax credits that Republicans allowed to expire, which would result in a spike in the health care costs for more than 20 million Americans.

It is an issue that benefits Democrats in two ways: on the one hand, they are the party that voters trust when it comes to health care issue, and on the other hand, this is a so-called kitchen table issue, i.e., it’s about soaring costs and household budgets.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who has consistently been one of Trump’s staunchest supporters on issues not related to the president’s former pal Jeffrey Epstein, said out loud on Thursday what many Republicans are probably thinking these days.

“I don’t think it’s good advice that a government shutdown is going to help Republicans in the midterms. I don’t agree with that,” the lawmaker said in an interview with CNN. “I also don’t think it’s good advice that Republicans ignoring the health insurance crisis is going to be good for midterms. I actually think that will be very bad for midterms.”

Greene, who blamed top Republicans in Congress for the shutdown, added that the majority of calls that her office fields are about the high cost of health insurance.

Those same GOP leaders are not just losing the messaging battle over what the fight is about; they also risk being exposed as schemers who are holding Americans on the federal payroll, especially the armed forces, hostage for political purposes.

A big part of their perceived leverage over Democrats, whose votes they need to reopen the government, is that they can blame them for the hardships that a shutdown brings.

However, this was exposed as politicking on Thursday morning when House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) made a rare appearance on C-SPAN and fielded calls from Americans.

In a clip that went viral, one of them was a woman from Virginia who said her husband serves in the military. She told Johnson that she has two “medically fragile” children who could die if her husband misses a paycheck.

This is probably the first time that most Americans realized that Congress could easily pass legislation that would exempt service members or federal employees from the shutdown.

However, Republicans refuse to do so because it would take away their perceived leverage over Democrats (it would also force Johnson to deal with the Epstein issue, which is something he hopes to avoid).

All that being said, with no end to the shutdown in sight, a lot can still happen in the coming days and weeks. However, right now, if we had to bet, it will be Republicans who blink first.