The contrast could not be more stark. 

A year ago, during Donald Trump’s first impeachment trial, presidential tweets and retweets lit up social media, disparaging House Democrats as they made their case for a Senate conviction. “Sleaze bag,” “con job,” “corrupt politician” – the barbs coming from then-President Trump’s Twitter account seemed endless. 

Today, midway through the former president’s historic second impeachment trial, the social media silence is almost deafening.

Mr. Trump’s permanent banishment from Twitter on Jan. 8, two days after the Capitol riot he is blamed by Democrats and some Republicans for inciting, has certainly crimped his style. He’s at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, living in deplatformed exile. Old-fashioned press releases from The Office of Donald J. Trump land in reporters’ inboxes. But the ex-president has made no TV or radio appearances since leaving office.

“His instinct is telling him to be quiet,” says Ford O’Connell, a Florida-based Republican strategist. 

Read more from Linda Feldmann at The Christian Science Monitor

Donald Trump’s legal team entered the second day of his impeachment trial on Wednesday on the back foot after a debut performance that was widely panned by Republican senators, including some of the former US president’s closest allies.

The first day of Trump’s trial kicked off on Tuesday with a powerful opening argument from Democratic impeachment managers acting as de facto prosecutors, who relied heavily on video footage that tried to tie the deadly January siege on the US Capitol to the former president’s words and actions.

Trump’s lawyers appeared to struggle to respond during a subsequent four-hour debate that was intended to settle the question of whether it is constitutional to try a former president once he has left office.

Ford O'Connell, a Trump ally and former Republican congressional candidate, said Democrats were "trying to ... prey upon the horrors of what happened in the Capitol in an effort to paint all Republican voters as extremists and to prevent Donald Trump from ever running for president in the future."

"They see the political game here," he added.

Read more from Lauren Fedor at the Financial Times

Donald Trump’s legal team entered the second day of his impeachment trial on Wednesday on the back foot after a debut performance that was widely panned by Republican senators, including some of the former US president’s closest allies.

The first day of Trump’s trial kicked off on Tuesday with a powerful opening argument from Democratic impeachment managers acting as de facto prosecutors, who relied heavily on video footage that tried to tie the deadly January siege on the US Capitol to the former president’s words and actions.

Trump’s lawyers appeared to struggle to respond during a subsequent four-hour debate that was intended to settle the question of whether it is constitutional to try a former president once he has left office.

Ford O'Connell, a Trump ally and former Republican congressional candidate, said Democrats were "trying to ... prey upon the horrors of what happened in the Capitol in an effort to paint all Republican voters as extremists and to prevent Donald Trump from ever running for president in the future."

"They see the political game here," he added.

Read more from Lauren Fedor at the Financial Times

Donald Trump’s legal team entered the second day of his impeachment trial on Wednesday on the back foot after a debut performance that was widely panned by Republican senators, including some of the former US president’s closest allies.

The first day of Trump’s trial kicked off on Tuesday with a powerful opening argument from Democratic impeachment managers acting as de facto prosecutors, who relied heavily on video footage that tried to tie the deadly January siege on the US Capitol to the former president’s words and actions.

Trump’s lawyers appeared to struggle to respond during a subsequent four-hour debate that was intended to settle the question of whether it is constitutional to try a former president once he has left office.

Ford O'Connell, a Trump ally and former Republican congressional candidate, said Democrats were "trying to ... prey upon the horrors of what happened in the Capitol in an effort to paint all Republican voters as extremists and to prevent Donald Trump from ever running for president in the future."

"They see the political game here," he added.

Read more from Lauren Fedor at the Financial Times

Donald Trump’s legal team entered the second day of his impeachment trial on Wednesday on the back foot after a debut performance that was widely panned by Republican senators, including some of the former US president’s closest allies.

The first day of Trump’s trial kicked off on Tuesday with a powerful opening argument from Democratic impeachment managers acting as de facto prosecutors, who relied heavily on video footage that tried to tie the deadly January siege on the US Capitol to the former president’s words and actions.

Trump’s lawyers appeared to struggle to respond during a subsequent four-hour debate that was intended to settle the question of whether it is constitutional to try a former president once he has left office.

Ford O'Connell, a Trump ally and former Republican congressional candidate, said Democrats were "trying to ... prey upon the horrors of what happened in the Capitol in an effort to paint all Republican voters as extremists and to prevent Donald Trump from ever running for president in the future."

"They see the political game here," he added.

Read more from Lauren Fedor at the Financial Times

After four years of moving in virtual lockstep with Donald Trump, Mitch McConnell used his final day as Senate majority leader to make a clean break with the outgoing president.

In a speech on the Senate floor on the eve of Joe Biden’s inauguration, McConnell, the chamber’s top Republican, placed the blame for the violent January 6 siege on the Capitol squarely on Trump.

Yet with the Senate trial due to begin this week, McConnell is striking a very different tone. Just one week after blaming Trump for the riots, he joined 44 fellow Republicans in backing a Senate motion declaring an impeachment trial unconstitutional because Trump is no longer in the White House.

“The Republican party is the party of Donald John Trump for the foreseeable future,” says Ford O’Connell, a former Republican congressional candidate in Florida and a Trump ally. “The base of the Republican party loves Trump, and the base has that power over elected officials in Washington.”

In his final days in office, Trump briefly toyed with the possibility of forming a “Patriot party”. But his allies now say the former president has gone off the idea, given the US system makes third parties exceedingly unlikely to succeed at the national level.

“The idea of a third party, while it sounds enticing in theory, in practicality it is a disaster,” says O’Connell. “It is the quickest way to make sure that you never get to power again.”

Read more from Lauren Fedor at the Financial Times

The pending prosecution of former President Donald Trump has Republicans caught between a rock and a hard place as they look to chart their political future, strategists say.

Five GOP senators -- Romney, U.S. Sens Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Pat Toomey of Pensylvania -- then voted against a Republican-led attempt to dismiss Trump's second impeachment trial as unconstitutional.

Still, Republican strategists Ford O'Connell said Democrats want to forge ahead with the trial in part to "create a divide within the Republican base between traditional GOP voters and Trump voters, because they are concerned that if the GOP gets its act together, that (the Democrats are) probably going to lose the House and could conceivably lose the Senate."

Read more from Lisa Kashinsky at the Boston Herald

Republicans are beginning to coalesce around a message for confronting President Biden’s new administration, with one GOP missive stating: “There’s bipartisan agreement. … Joe Biden’s a partisan.”

The GOP is hammering Biden’s executive orders, his use of a budgetary maneuver to pass a COVID-19 relief package without Senate Republicans (despite their offers to compromise), and even occasional clashes with the dwindling number of centrist and red-state Democrats on Capitol Hill to undercut the new president’s talk of “unity.”

But as was the case during the 2020 presidential campaign, the Republican message is having a difficult time being heard over continued discussion of former President Donald Trump and their own infighting. The headlines over the past week were dominated by an unsuccessful attempt to boot House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney from her leadership position because she voted to impeach Trump and the House stripping Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments for conspiracy theorizing and incendiary comments. Soon attention will turn to Trump’s Senate trial, his second in as many years.

That hasn’t stopped some Democrats from questioning whether their party leadership is trying to squeeze too much legislative output out of their razor-thin majorities without Republican cooperation.

Republican operatives see a target-rich environment ahead of a midterm election in which they need only a net gain of one seat in the Senate and seven in the House to recapture the majorities.

“President Biden’s ‘return to normalcy’ has been an unmitigated disaster, and while congressional Democrats may not yet realize it, or choose to ignore the harsh realities outside of D.C., as the corporate media does,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “We were assured that Biden had a ready-to-go vaccine distribution plan, but America quickly found out he didn’t. Most voters want their kids back in school yesterday, but Biden is petrified of the teachers unions."

"America was told that Biden would govern from the middle and would work to seek bipartisan consensus," he added. "Instead, Biden is issuing radical executive orders on just about every issue from open borders to canceling the Keystone XL pipeline to nonsensical climate edicts like they were parking tickets accrued after a late night in Foggy Bottom. Fifty percent of America simply did not vote for this hard-left turn.”

Republicans are cognizant of the challenge.

“Yes, Biden’s early approval ratings remain high, but it is only a matter of time before America wakes up to the harsh realities of what Biden and company means for their families,” O’Connell said. “And for those who doubt what I am saying, there is a reason why the top political story in the U.S. for the last week has been about the past utterances of a backbench congresswoman from Georgia who, until recently, 99% of America had never heard of.”

“The reason is simple: If corporate media can’t fraudulently paint the Republican Party as ‘extremists’ before the American public feels the pain of one-party rule," he added, "then the Biden administration will be neutered at the ballot box in 2022."

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner

Ten House Republicans joined Democrats in voting to impeach President Donald Trump for inciting the attack on the U.S. Capitol. It was a sign that some members were unwilling to tie their political fates to the outgoing leader of their party but much of the GOP still stands behind Trump.

The defections represented a significant break among some high-profile members who are looking to distance themselves and their party from Trump as he leaves office.

According to GOP strategist Ford O'Connell, the Republicans betting their political fortunes on Trump losing his influence on the party are making a risky wager.

"Chances are they're probably going to face a primary in 2022. The Republican base is still walking in lockstep with President Trump and going against him comes with costs," O'Connell said.

O'Connell warned that Republicans "have long memories" and that the base of the party will remember the actions taken by the handful of congressmen Wednesday.

Read more from Leandra Bernstein at NBC 15 News

For Republicans, it turned out to be a rough 48 hours. The party will soon find itself shut out of power in Washington, with the substantial exception of the courts, for the first time since early in Barack Obama’s first term a decade ago.

Both of the Georgia Senate seats fell to the Democrats, giving them a majority in that chamber, and unified control of the elected branches of the federal government, after noon on Jan. 20. Barely hours after these races were called, Washington descended into chaos as a mob, trusting in and infuriated by President Trump’s claim that the presidential election was stolen, breached the Capitol. The four deaths and destruction cast a dark shadow over Trump’s tumultuous term, triggering White House resignations and newly bipartisan calls for his immediate removal from office.

“The lazy take, championed by many in the mainstream media and by the chattering class, is to blame President Trump and the disjointed messaging that came from the GOP during the runoff,” said Republican strategist Ford O’Connell. “But the bottom line is that Republicans got outflanked on the ground in Georgia. Due to the changing demographics of the state, Democrats wisely invested in organizing and in registering new voters, and it paid off. Therefore, it is the Georgia Democratic Party that deserves the kudos here, and Georgia Republicans need to up their game because now, Georgia is a purple state that is getting bluer by the minute.”

Read more from W. James Antle III at the Washington Examiner