WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and his allies have predicted the president will see a similar impeachment outcome as former President Bill Clinton did: an acquittal in the Senate, a subsequent spike in popularity, and a backlash against the opposing party in the following elections.

Yet, two months into the process, it’s become clear that an expectation of Clinton’s results hasn’t translated into an embrace of his tactics. Trump isn’t following the Clinton playbook, the strategies that helped his predecessor weather the impeachment process — a reality that’s frustrated and sparked concern among even his biggest defenders.

For much of Clinton’s impeachment hearings, his approval ratings were in the 60 percent range. They hit the highest point of his presidency at 73 percent approval following his impeachment trial in the Senate, according to Gallup.

Trump, on the other hand, has seen his approval rating stuck in the low-40s, with no sizable shift in public support in his favor since the impeachment process began. Despite Trump’s near-daily attacks on the inquiry, the public has remained split over whether he should be impeached and removed from office, with stronger voter support for that prospect than Clinton ever faced.

The divergent strategies are one factor that could explain the differing results, at least so far. Here are a few of the ways that the Clinton and Trump responses contrast:

Into vs. above the fray

While Trump rarely goes more than a few hours without weighing in on the impeachment inquiry, Clinton’s strategy was to appear above the impeachment fray, a figure too busy working on behalf of the American people to spend his days focused on the investigation by Ken Starr or the impeachment proceedings that followed.

To do that, he left it to his lawyers and television defenders, such as James Carville and Lanny Davis, to combat Republicans and only addressed the controversy in key moments.

It’s the same advice Clinton has said he would give Trump today.

“My message would be, look, you got hired to do a job, you don’t get the days back you blow off. Every day is an opportunity to make something good happen,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN anchor Jake Tapper on Nov. 14. “I would say, ‘I’ve got lawyers and staff people handling this impeachment inquiry, and they should just have at it. Meanwhile, I’m going to work for the American people.’ That’s what I would do.”

Even Trump’s allies have pleaded with him to follow the Clinton model here, leveraging the Oval Office backdrop to foster the image of a president hard at work, not like one spending his days fuming on Twitter and watching cable news.

“President Clinton defended himself but he never stopped being presidential,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., told reporters earlier this fall of the Clinton White House. “… The public may not have liked what the president had done, but believed that he was still able to do his job, and as he governed during impeachment, I think that was the single best thing he did.”

There have been moments when it seemed Trump was listening to the advice of supporters like Graham.

He spent much of the first day of public impeachment hearings meeting at the White House with Turkish President Tayyip Recep Erdogan, with press secretary Stephanie Grisham saying he was “too busy” to watch the testimony.

During the second week of the hearings, as his ambassador to the European Union, Gordon Sondland, implicated him in a quid pro quo — alleging he had looked to pressure the Ukrainians to investigate his political rival, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son Hunter — Trump toured an Apple manufacturing plant, talking about jobs.

But the presidential moments have been short-lived — and throughout, it has been clear Trump has been watching the proceedings.

Trump tweeted a real-time attack on the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, in the middle of her testimony, causing Democrats to accuse him of witness intimidation. During a break in testimony last week, he reenacted to reporters testimony by Sondland that he argued had exonerated him, using notes he’d scrawled in black marker from the televised hearing. A day later, he gave an interview to Fox News where he denied all wrongdoing, insulted witnesses, and doubled down on conspiracy theories around Ukraine.

“I have sinned” vs. a “perfect call”

Clinton, while denying he committed perjury and obstruction of justice, eventually issued a public apology for his affair: he had “sinned,” he said, asking for forgiveness and apologizing for the hurt he’d caused his family and the American people. The apology came after Clinton admitted to the relationship with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky in videotaped grand jury testimony.

It was a point his lawyers even emphasized in their opening statement before the Senate when arguing he doesn’t deserve to be impeached.

“The president wants everyone to know — the committee, the Congress, and the country — that he is genuinely sorry for the pain and the damage that he has caused and for the wrongs that he has committed” White House special counsel Gregory Craig said on the first day of Clinton’s impeachment trial.

Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly denied there was anything wrong with asking the Ukrainian president to investigate his political rival, saying around 200 times so far that his call at the center of the impeachment inquiry was “perfect.”

The lack of apology and remorse makes it difficult for his defenders, said Lanny Davis, who acted as the primary public spokesman for Clinton

“We had one situation where I, on television, was able to say President Clinton has acknowledged his mistake, apologized to the American people and went before the grand jury,” Davis said. “I could not have made that statement for President Trump.”

Trump has instead swatted down any suggestion he may have acted inappropriately in any way — and encouraged his defenders to do the same, even as some Republicans in Congress have suggested it was inappropriate, though not impeachable, to ask the Ukrainian president for such a favor.

“The call to the Ukrainian President was PERFECT. Read the Transcript! There was NOTHING said that was in any way wrong,” Trump said in a tweet Nov. 10. “Republicans, don’t be led into the fools trap of saying it was not perfect, but is not impeachable. No, it is much stronger than that. NOTHING WAS DONE WRONG!”

War room vs. “I’m the team”

Clinton assembled a team of aides and outside advisers singularly focused on impeachment to help free up White House staff to carry on with their daily duties and try to minimize the distraction the process created internally.

The Clinton team tasked a handful of people to serve as his public defenders to help keep the messaging focused, said Davis, a former White House counsel who was one of those surrogates.

Davis said he went on television almost daily during some periods, and would consult regularly with the White House lawyers and the political advisers on his message. He kept the talking points focused on the idea that what Clinton did was a personal matter, not an abuse of the office, and between him and his family.

“We had a very simple message based on facts,” said Davis, while Trump’s defenders “are in an impossible situation. They have my sympathy. … They don’t have a message based on facts, so they are all over the place.”

Trump has dismissed the idea of a need for a so-called war room or dedicated staff to battle impeachment.

“I don’t have teams. Everyone’s talking about ‘teams.’ I’m the team. I did nothing wrong,” Trump told reporters Oct. 25.

But the White House and its surrogates have struggled to settle on a clear, consistent defense. Their messaging has instead been notable for headline-grabbing stumbles, such as acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney’s need to walk back his statement, made during a press briefing, that security funding to Ukraine was linked to the country committing to investigate 2016 election interference.

As the impeachment process moved into the public sphere this month, the White House brought in former Treasury spokesman Tony Sayegh and former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to help direct the messaging efforts. But the White House still lacks an individual solely focused on impeachment who reports directly to the president.

Instead, there has been internal infighting, with a rift between Mulvaney and White House counsel Pat Cipillone over who should be taking the lead on guiding the strategy, according to sources familiar with the situation.

Discredit, dismiss

On the other hand, there has been at least one area in which the Trump and the Clinton strategies have overlapped: their attempts to discredit and dismiss the investigation itself, the officials directing it and the individuals conducting it.

Clinton’s team made a villain out of independent counsel Ken Starr, looking to paint him as a “prissy, partisan, pompous prosecutor,” James Carville said during a speech last month. Starr fought back, at times grabbing the impeachment probe spotlight himself and distracting attention from Clinton.

“Of course, he played right into it and I had more fun slapping Ken Starr around than almost anything I’ve ever done in my life,” Carville said.

Trump has sought to do the same with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, D-Calif. He’s chucked one insult after another at them, calling them “human scum,” making fun of Schiff’s neck size, referring to Pelosi as “crazy Nancy,” and calling her congressional district a “disgusting slum.”

And the Clinton team, like Trump’s surrogates, sought to downplay the charges made against them.

“We trivialized the charge — ‘You’re looking to do this over that? Come on, guys?’” Carville said.

Trump’s allies have sought to make a similar argument. Even those Republicans who say it was improper for Trump to ask a foreign government to dig up dirt on a political rival have argued it wasn’t an impeachable offense. Others have proposed that the fact that Ukraine ultimately received the delayed aid, amid a congressional outcry, means that there is no longer an offense to investigate.

“Concern is different than rising to the level of impeachment,” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., told NBC’s “Meet the Press” last month. “I look at it this way: The aid is there and the investigations didn’t happen. So, if there was a quid pro quo, it certainly wasn’t a very effective one.”

Then again, that’s another Clinton-era argument — that the president’s actions may have been flawed in some fashion, but not fatally — that Trump himself has remained unwilling to embrace.

“I always say,” Trump asked at a campaign rally last month, “how do you impeach a president who didn’t do anything wrong?”

WASHINGTON — Previewing potential articles of impeachment, the House Democrats on Saturday issued a lengthy report drawing on history and the Founding Fathers to lay out the legal argument over the case against President Donald Trump’s actions toward Ukraine.

The findings from the House Judiciary Committee do not spell out the formal charges against the president, which are being drafted ahead of votes, possibly as soon as next week. Instead, the report refutes Trump’s criticism of the impeachment proceedings, arguing that the Constitution created impeachment as a “safety valve” so Americans would not have to wait for the next election to remove a president.

It refers to the writings of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and others to link Trump’s actions in his July phone call with Ukraine’s president seeking political investigations of his rivals to the kind of behavior that would “horrify” the framers.

“Where the President uses his foreign affairs power in ways that betray the national interest for his own benefit, or harm national security for equally corrupt reasons, he is subject to impeachment by the House,” the Democrats wrote. “Indeed, foreign interference in the American political system was among the gravest dangers feared by the Founders of our Nation and the Framers of our Constitution.”

Democrats are working through the weekend as articles are being drafted and committee members are preparing for a hearing Monday. Democrats say Trump abused his power in a July 25 phone call when he asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for a favor and engaged in bribery by withholding nearly $400 million in military aide that Ukraine depends on to counter Russian aggression.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi says it’s part of a troubling pattern of behavior from Trump that benefits Russia and not the U.S.

Trump has insisted he did nothing wrong. “Witch Hunt!”the president tweeted Saturday morning.

The articles of impeachment are likely to encompass two major themes — abuse of office and obstruction — as Democrats strive to reach the Constitution’s bar of “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.”

In releasing his report Saturday, Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., said the president’s actions are the framers’ “worst nightmare.”

“President Trump abused his power, betrayed our national security, and corrupted our elections, all for personal gain. The Constitution details only one remedy for this misconduct: impeachment,” Nadler said in a statement. “The safety and security of our nation, our democracy, and future generations hang in the balance if we do not address this misconduct. In America, no one is above the law, not even the President.”

The report released Saturday is an update of similar reports issued during the Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton impeachments and lays out the justification for articles under consideration, including abuse of power, bribery and obstruction.

It does not lay out the facts of the Ukraine case, but it hints at potential articles of impeachment and explains the thinking behind Democrats’ decision to draft them. Without frequently mentioning Trump, it alludes to his requests that Ukraine investigate Democrats, a move he believed would benefit him politically, by saying a president who “perverts his role as chief diplomat to serve private rather than public ends” has unquestionably engaged in the high crimes and misdemeanors laid out in the Constitution. That is true “especially” if he invited rather than opposed foreign interference, the report says.

The report examines treason, bribery, serious abuse of power, betrayal of the national interest through foreign entanglements and corruption of office and elections. Democrats have been focused on an overall abuse of power article, with the possibility of breaking out a separate, related article on bribery. They are also expected to draft at least one article on obstruction of Congress, or obstruction of justice.

In laying out the grounds for impeachable offenses, the report directly refutes several of the president’s claims in a section called “fallacies about impeachment,” including that the inquiry is based on secondhand evidence, that a president can do what he wants to do, and that Democrats’ motives are corrupt.

“The President’s honesty in an impeachment inquiry, or his lack thereof, can thus shed light on the underlying issue,” the report says.

In pushing ahead with the impeachment inquiry, Democrats are bringing the focus back to Russia.

Pelosi is connecting the dots — “all roads lead to Putin,” she says — and making the argument that Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine was not an isolated incident but part of a troubling bond with the Russian president reaching back to special counsel Robert Mueller’s findings on the 2016 election interference.

“This isn’t about Ukraine,” she explained a day earlier. “‘It’s about Russia. Who benefited by our withholding of that military assistance? Russia.”

It’s an attempt to explain why Americans should care that Trump pushed Ukraine to investigate rival Joe Biden while withholding the military aid that Congress had approved.

At the same time, by tracing the arc of Trump’s behavior from the 2016 campaign to the present, it stitches it all together. And that helps the speaker balance her left-flank liberals, who want more charges brought against Trump, including from Mueller’s report, and centrist Democrats who prefer to keep the argument more narrowly focused on Ukraine.

Pelosi and her team are trying to convey a message that impeachment is indeed about Ukraine, but also about a pattern of behavior that could stoke renewed concern about his attitude toward Russia ahead of the 2020 election.

Trump pushed back on the Democrats’ message. “The people see that it’s just a continuation of this three-year witch hunt,” he told reporters as he left the White House on a trip to Florida.

Late Friday, White House counsel Pat Cipollone informed the Judiciary Committee that the administration would not be participating in upcoming hearings, decrying the proceedings as “completely baseless.”

And Trump’s campaign announced new rallies taking the case directly to voters — as well as a new email fundraising pitch that claims the Democrats have “gone absolutely insane.”

“The Democrats have NO impeachment case and are demeaning our great Country at YOUR expense,” Trump wrote in the email to supporters. “It’s US against THEM.”

Impeachment articles could include obstruction of Congress, as the White House ordered officials not to comply with House subpoenas for testimony or documents in the inquiry. They could also include obstruction of justice, based on Mueller’s report on the original Trump-Russia investigation.

There is still robust internal debate among House Democrats over how many articles to write and how much to include — and particularly whether there should be specific mention of Mueller’s findings from his two-year investigation into Trump’s possible role in Russia’s 2016 election interference.

The special counsel could not determine that Trump’s campaign conspired or coordinated with Russia. However, Mueller said he could not exonerate Trump of obstructing justice in the probe and left it for Congress to determine.