Republicans' Trump dilemma

A major asset to the forget-about-it defense has been the silent serenity of Trump himself, who has hardly been heard from since retreating to Florida last week. He left office with the reliable support of roughly eight in 10 Republicans nationwide, and in the days since then he has begun to recede, with a startling quietude, into figurehead status…

Even most of Trump’s supporters consistently said in polls that they wished he would set fires on Twitter less often. And it is his public statements — including those he made on the social media platform — that prompted this impeachment in the first place. “When I did polls and focus groups with Trump voters, they would say time and time again: They wished he would stop tweeting so much,” said Glen Bolger, a longtime Republican pollster.

“There is certainly something to be said for a little bit of a pressure valve loosened, if he’s not tweeting stupid things every day,” Bolger said of Republican senators who are deciding how to vote on impeachment. “I think the bigger factor that they’ll be thinking about is, what are the implications in terms of me being primaried by someone?”