Of the 157 tweets President Donald Trump has sent in the last month alone, just six have singled out individuals for ridicule. And half of those have been directed at Richard Blumenthal.

The senior senator from Connecticut, who’s made reticence and prudence the guideposts of his first four decades in political life, is projecting a very different sort of persona these days. While presenting himself in public as quietly as ever, he’s become one of president’s most incisive Democratic antagonists on an array of topics.

And the trenchant, if soft-spoken, rhetoric from the senator, whom Trump has taken to demeaning as “Richie” — the two have long been connected through the world of big-money New York real estate — has clearly gotten under the president’s skin as much as anything else said on Capitol Hill this spring.

At the administration’s start, Blumenthal was particularly derisive of several prominent nominees and then took a lead in stoking congressional antagonism to both of Trump’s efforts to restrict travelers from certain Muslim-majority nations.

[Blumenthal Says He Won’t Be ‘Bullied’ By ‘Slurs’ From Trump]