I don’t think I’ve ever been one of those “extremely online” people who lives and breathes Twitter controversies and whatever “political war” being fought via tweets. There are so many political stories which originated from Twitter wars and they take me completely off-guard. But even someone like me, someone moderately online, is well aware of the very strange political realignment which has happened on social media following the January 6th insurrection, and following Twitter’s mass banning of Nazis, and their suspension of Donald Trump’s account. It’s really remarkable how different everything feels just in the past three weeks. People in the Biden administration are feeling it too – after January 6th, they have not had to contend with Donald Trump’s constant whining, lies, conspiracies and threats of violence. And they feel #blessed.

As he entered his first week in office, President Joe Biden was handed a priceless gift: the blissful sound of former President Donald Trump’s Twitter silence. Gone are the pre-dawn tirades, the all-caps declarations, the “Sleepy Joe” mocking, the Fox News-driven agitations and the general incitements. Instead, Biden debuted a flurry of executive orders without ever having to deal with what surely would have been rapid-fire antagonism from the man whose legacy he was dismantling.

Inside the White House, officials insist that their communications strategy hasn’t changed simply because Trump is both gone and silent.

“The President spent two years ignoring Trump’s distractions and staying focused on the message he wanted to deliver, and it paid off with a commanding win,” a White House official said in a statement to POLITICO on Wednesday. “Whether or not Trump slinks back into public view or opens up a Parler account isn’t going to make a difference in how we communicate with the American people.”

But even if the strategy would have remained the same, Biden’s team also concedes that the absence of Trump and his Twitter feed has been a pleasant addition to the job it’s doing.

“Not having to deal with a deranged new tweet every hour? They feel blessed,” an outside adviser said.

Indeed, Twitter’s suspension of Trump’s account has seemed to realign the political universe, minimizing diversions and interruptions as the broader conversation over Biden’s agenda played out. Trump wasn’t there to demand a popular uprising against Biden’s federal mask-wearing mandate. His Twitter megaphone wasn’t hyping the construction job losses that could come when Biden ended the Keystone XL pipeline project. Trump wasn’t calling Biden a “loser” for his Covid-19 vaccination plans, or attacking Anthony Fauci as a failure he should have fired when the nation’s leading infectious disease expert spoke out about how difficult it was for scientists to operate in the Trump administration.

“It has become abundantly clear since his absence on Twitter how much Trump was driving a media narrative,” said Paul Bentz, an Arizona-based Republican strategist and pollster. Biden still has faced a steady flow of criticism during his short time in office. But nothing has come even comparably close to getting trapped in the gravitational pull of Trump’s Twitter feed, which had the ability to move markets, unseat office holders and tear up news cycles again and again in a matter of hours.

[From Politico]

Politico quoted one “Republican strategist” who was basically like “well, now Biden has all the attention, which could be a bad thing.” Like, do Republicans really think that Democrats are going to lament the idea of putting attention onto actual issues and their own leadership? It also underlines the fact that most of Trump’s tweets didn’t actually have a political goal or any kind of larger, coherent political strategy: Trump’s tweets were just about his incessant need for attention, his bottomless desire to be centered in every story. Plus, he was a thin-skinned, baby-fisted bully who loved the idea of sitting in his diaper, rage-screeching at people. Trump must be bouncing off the walls of Mar-a-Lago without his Twitter account. And yes, it’s okay to admit that Democrats are really happy that they don’t have to contend with his Twitter bullsh-t.

Also: President Biden understands how to make viral content too.

PETER DOOCY: Mr President, what did you talk to Vladimir Putin about?

PRESIDENT BIDEN: You. He sends his best. pic.twitter.com/Fq0zglc9aK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 26, 2021

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.