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In Twitter war with Warren, Trump tries a new tactic: Silence

For a strictly online relationship, it has been tumultuous.

She tweets that he’s a “thin-skinned moneygrubber” who fights only for himself and can’t stand losing to “a girl.” He rips her as “goofy,” a “total hypocrite,” and “fraud.”

For months, as the 2016 presidential campaign has ground on, Senator Elizabeth Warren has been Donald J. Trump’s high-profile antagonist on the Republican nominee’s favorite turf: Twitter.

In a campaign in which many have tried and failed to take on Trump in his own vernacular, Warren has enjoyed some success.

But like all relationships, this one has changed with time.

Trump has fought back in recent weeks with the silent treatment, not mentioning Warren on Twitter since the day after Warren lambasted Trump in remarks at the Democratic National Convention, in support of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

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“Pocahontas bombed last night!” Trump tweeted July 26, a provocative reference to Warren’s claim of Native American ancestors. “Sad to watch.”

Trump’s silence on Warren is a sign he is listening to his advisers, said Mark S. Mellman, a Democratic political strategist and president and chief executive of The Mellman Group, in Washington, D.C.

“One of the things that his campaign has desperately been trying to enforce on him is some sense of discipline,” Mellman said in a Globe interview. “One area they seem to have made some progress is keeping his focus on Clinton, though he can’t help but attack the media, too. Generally, he’s tried to focus his fire on Clinton and the media.”

A Donald Trump tweet about Elizabeth Warren.

During their exchanges, it didn’t matter what Trump thumb-typed in answer to Warren’s taunts: Each time Trump responded was a win for Warren, said Whit Ayres, a Republican political strategist and pollster who worked for Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign.

“One of the basics of Politics 101 is you fight with the candidates who are your opponents, not those who are not,” Ayres said, in a Globe interview. “There’s no cost to Warren in doing this; the cost is to Trump, when he gets baited into reacting to someone who’s not on the ballot against him.”

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Warren said it was not her original intention to engage Trump in a long-running social media slap fight.

She began tweeting at Trump when the results of Republican primaries made it clear Trump would be the GOP nominee. “At that point, the Republicans were not going to stop him,” Warren said, in a phone interview. “I was looking for a way to respond. I tweeted a few times and it took off from there.”

Warren said her staff helped with ideas, but “I work on every tweet.”

Democratic political strategist Peter Fenn, president of Fenn Communications Group, in Washington, D.C., said Warren “is one of the few to speak Trump’s language” — the language of cutting insults.

“When he called her Pocahontas and started to do his usual insults, she fought back,” Fenn said. “And so where he was seemingly taking advantage of others using Twitter, she managed to take advantage of him and his approach.”

Experts foresee no political risk for Warren in her Twitter war with Trump.

“She’s playing to her base, which is completely different from Trump’s,” said political scientist Darrell M. West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution, a public policy organization in Washington. Warren, he said, has been more effective against Trump on Twitter than GOP presidential candidates because, “even though his Republican rivals didn’t like Trump, they wanted his voters so they never felt free to match his insults.”

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Republican political consultant Matt Mackowiak said that despite the attention Trump generates on social media, the nominee is “not really good at the back and forth on Twitter,” and would be better off ignoring Warren and other distractions. “If he would just focus on Hillary and Obama, it would do him a lot of good,” he said. “Maybe bring some Republicans home.”

State Representative Geoff Diehl, a Whitman Republican and state co-chairman of the Trump campaign, said he doubts Warren has had much effect on the race, and predicted she would have even less influence on the remainder of the contest.

“She clearly felt [Twitter] was a medium that she enjoyed using to get under his skin,” Diehl said. “But it looks like it really hasn’t had the effect; in fact I think Trump has been up to the challenge she has been trying to throw out there.”

He accused Warren, once considered a potential Clinton vice-presidential pick, of abandoning progressive supporters of Clinton’s primary rival for the nomination, Senator Bernie Sanders. “After her endorsement of Hillary, [Warren] has had a diminished profile,” Diehl said. “It has the feel to me of someone who has been used by the Clinton machine and now has been spit out, as [Clinton] has moved on with a different vice presidential pick.”

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A Clinton campaign spokesperson was not available at deadline.

Whether Trump ignores her on not, Warren intends to keep the feud alive. Last week she sent one of her harshest tweets, calling Trump “a pathetic coward who can’t handle the fact that he’s losing to a girl.”

“I do it because I think it’s the right thing to do,” Warren said. “This man could wreck our economy in just a few weeks” as president.

Fighting with Trump would be fun, she said, were it not for the stakes involved:

“The fact that there is any chance that Donald Trump could be —” she paused, and then said, “I can’t even finish that sentence.” She started over, “It would be fun if there was no chance Donald Trump could be president of the United States. That takes all the fun out of it.”


Mark Arsenault can be reached at mark.arsenault@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @bostonglobemark