Trump has been eerily quiet on Twitter for the last few days

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Donald Trump

• President Donald Trump has only sent one rather banal tweet over the last two days, which is highly unusual.
• Trump tweets on average four times a day.
• The timing is particularly odd because of the important develops in the Russia investigation that have dropped in recent days.

Over the past two days, President Donald Trump's Twitter feed has been unusually quiet.

The only tweet he has sent since January 28 was a fairly routine congratulatory message for newly approved Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar. The president's last tweet before that one praised his administration's economic progress, and was sent on Sunday.

This end-of-month lull is strange because, according to Twitter Counter, Trump wrote an average of four tweets a day over the past three months. The timing for his apparent Twitter vacation is also odd because of the number of high-level political developments have taken place in the Russia investigation in recent days, from FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe resigning to the House Intelligence Committee voting to release a controversial memo that Trump has frequently praised.

In past situations like this, Trump had been quick to take to Twitter either to boast about his victories or malign his political opponents.

In the past, White House aides have privately complained about Trump's affinity for using Twitter to discuss sensitive policies, but they have since developed strategies to live with them. For instance, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has his staff print out Trump's tweets and uses them to figure out how to craft policies that dovetail with the president's online positions.

Others, like White House chief of staff John Kelly, simply don't read them.

Trump's State of the Union address is Tuesday night. He has said he wants to present a message of unity, so it is possible that he has laid off Twitter to avoid sending any competing messages before his big speech.