We’ve been gorging on the travails of Donald Trump and the Republicans. When a president and his own governing party step in so many cowpats in so brief a period of time, it’s hard to avert your gaze. What’s next? Mitch McConnell drops his trousers on the steps of Congress?

That happened already, of course. The humiliation that was the Senate rebuke in the wee hours of Friday to McConnell’s last-gasp effort to kill the Affordable Care Act – or Obamacare – can’t be overstated. A majority leader just doesn’t ask for a floor vote unless he knows how it will turn out. Not at 1.30am. Not when half the land has stayed awake to watch. Not when the thing you’re trying to do has been the sole obsession of your party for nigh on eight years.

But let’s give some due to the Democrats, who have almost been forgotten in all of this. “It’s been a long, long road. I suggest we turn the page,” Chuck Schumer, the Minority leader, offered minutes after McConnell’s so-called “Skinny Bill” at least to unwind parts of Obamacare fell to defeat. If the senator from New York was looking smug, you could hardly blame him.

Hillary Clinton wins! That was the headline we thought we were going to be reading last November. But maybe now she does. The one thing that most terrified her supporters about the unthinkable occurring – complete Republican control of Washington – was that the only really big thing Democrats had done in eight years with Barack Obama at the top would be destroyed.

Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Show all 22 1 /22 Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Donald Trump's international Presidential trips French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump talk as they leave the Army Museum at Les Invalides in Paris AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US President Donald Trump arrive for the group photo at the G7 Taormina summit on the island of Sicily in May 2017 Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Mr Trump was pressed on the subject at the G7 summit in Italy Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump gives a speeech at the Warsaw Uprising Monument on Krasinski Square Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Britain's Prime Minister Theresa May during a ceremony at the NATO headquarters before the start of a summit in Brussels, Belgium Reuters Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Montenegro's Prime Minister Dusko Markovic is seen to the right of Donald Trump at a Nato summit in Brussels REUTERS Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Pope Francis meeting with US President Donald J. Trump EPA Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Pope Francis poses with US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump arrives at Palazzo del Quirinale ahead of the meeting with Italian President Sergio Mattarella Ufficio Stampa Presidenza della via Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump is seen during a joint press conference with the Palestinian leader at the presidential palace in the West Bank city of Bethlehem AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas meets US President Donald Trump PPO via Getty Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks with US President Donald Trump prior to the President's departure GPO via Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shake hands after delivering a speech at the Israel Museum AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump lay a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance as White House senior advisor Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump watch on during a visit to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial museum AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump visit to Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in Jerusalem accompanied by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu GPO via Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump takes his seat before his speech to the Arab Islamic American Summit in Riyadh in Saudi Arabia Reuters Donald Trump's international Presidential trips Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud, US President Donald Trump and US First Lady Melania Trump look at a display of Saudi modern art at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump and Saudi Arabia's King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud take part in a signing ceremony at the Saudi Royal Court in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips King Salman presents Donald Trump with The Collar of Abdulaziz al-Saud Medal at the Royal Court Palace on 20 May AP Donald Trump's international Presidential trips US President Donald Trump is welcomed by Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud upon arrival at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh AFP/Getty Images Donald Trump's international Presidential trips U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump walk on the South Lawn prior to their first foreign trip Getty Images

Obamacare, an attempt at last to bring a kind of universal health coverage to the last country in the developed world not to have it, was, Clinton declared, “one of the great accomplishments not only of this president, but of the Democratic Party going back to Harry Truman”.

Call it a vicarious victory for Clinton, at least. It comes thanks to Schumer who warned colleagues in January that Republicans would try to pick them off one by one in their quest to kill the health law. Only by sticking together would they thwart them. This wasn’t going to be easy. The Democrats are no more ideologically homogeneous than the Republicans are, ranging from Bernie Sanders on the left to Joe Manchin of West Virginia to the centre. But they did it.

They also coordinated with a fearsome army of grass-roots resisters, including groups like MoveOn.org, Indivisible and the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Relations were sometimes tense, the anti-Trump factions not always convinced the Senate Democrats would stay strong. Indeed, Schumer was not always as obstructive on the Hill as they wanted. But his strategy of more constructive resistance – he allowed members to talk to Republicans about improving Obamacare but never, ever about repealing it outright – worked. Instead of Republicans exploiting Democrat disunity, it was Democrats who exploited their’s.

All the while, a group of former Obama aides who had been at ground zero of passing the Affordable Care Act and then shielding it from various assaults had come quietly come out of retirement to form a third front. Called Protect Our Care, the group included Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, who was plotting a month-long, nationwide bus tour to pressure Republicans not to dump Obamacare. That won’t be necessary now. As the New York Times reported this week, Leslie Dach, one of Obama’s top health care officials, meanwhile ran a war room in Washington also helping to coordinate the grass-roots resistance.

What they did was win the propaganda war. The White House and congressional Republicans continued to peddle the notion that Obamacare was a catastrophe. Americans couldn’t use the doctors they wanted, faced stiff fines if they ignored the law’s requirement that every America buy insurance and sometimes lost coverage anyway because of soaring premiums. Elements of the message were true - premiums are rising fast. But the momentum was shifting to the Democrats. The greatest of ironies is this: Obamacare was never as popular when Obama was president as it is now, with more than 50 per cent of Americans now saying they’d like to keep it. It didn’t hurt that with every new Republican proposal so came a new forecast from the Congressional Budget Office of how many Americans would lose coverage as a result. 26 million. 23 million. 16 million.

Republicans sometimes have the easier job of getting their message across just because it is so simple: government intrusion is bad. Taxes are bad. Freedom to choose is good, and so forth. But all that is only so much ideological guff when policy decisions actually impact directly on people’s lives. Even Trump voters started to see through it. If you are poor and live in one of the 33 states that accepted a massive expansion of Medicaid benefits that was allowable under Obamacare, they were always going to ask what will happen to them if those benefits are erased.

Republicans should have grasped that once new benefits are given, there is no taking them away. The watered-down Skinny Bill was a nonsense, because it sought to leave the good bits of Obamacare intact while taking away the “bad” bits like the mandate that said you must have health insurance just as you must have car insurance. You can’t have one without the other; the system would simply collapse. It’s why Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina publicly called it a “fraud” and why, in the most dramatic moment of his career, the ailing Senator John McCain killed it by voting "no" alongside Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.