With public impeachment hearings launching this week, Trump is expected to move into communications overdrive with an approach fundamentally at odds with what traditional presidential aides would advise. By choice, he is confronting the existential threats to his presidency largely alone and relying heavily on his own instincts and skills to guide the White House — all while feeling frustrated by White House aides’ lack of aggressiveness in defending him.

“Whether it is cutting taxes or regulations, or skating through the Mueller probe, he has propelled through each time doing it his own way,” said Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary and communications director. “He has done it his own way for three years, and it has worked.”

But Trump’s tactics of speaking directly to supporters, branding catchphrases and casting critical information as fake might not work as well on impeachment as Democrats gather testimony and evidence from top officials not beholden to the Trump orbit. Even Trump himself is not sure he can beat impeachment, said a person close to the White House.

“This is a lot different than doing ‘Low Energy Jeb.’ When it does not involve smearing and innuendo, and it does not play solely on people’s emotions, then he is in trouble,” said Timothy O’Brien, author of the biography “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “He doesn’t argue well when there is an obvious fact pattern at play. That is his Achilles’ heel.”

O’Brien pointed to last winter’s government shutdown, the Republicans’ failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act and slow movement on his push to build a border wall as examples of Trump’s bravado failing to help him win the political argument or public sentiment. In the first two instances, Republicans suffered politically and had to back down — an approach anathema to this president’s never-ending-fight approach — while courts have struck down many of the president’s boldest immigration moves.

“Whether it is cutting taxes or regulations, or skating through the Mueller probe ... he has done it his own way for three years, and it has worked.” Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary and communications director.

The other communication problem for Trump heading into impeachment is that, while his base fiercely supports him, his aggressive style of saying whatever is on his mind can turn off potential suburban voters. Losses at the state level in Virginia, leading to Democratic control of the statehouse, and the loss of the governor’s race in red Kentucky bolstered Republicans’ angst about the way his moves could inflict deep damage on the GOP in 2020.

The Trump approach to impeachment is expected to follow his usual response to adversity: Flood the zone with so much content that no one can tell what it true, false, biased or just plain spin.

While Trump has held significantly fewer White House news conferences than Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, he has spoken directly and off-the-cuff to reporters with much greater frequency, according to research by Martha Joynt Kumar, director of the White House Transition Project and a longtime student of presidential communication.

Trump held 512 short question-and-answer sessions with reporters from his inauguration through September 2019, according to Kumar’s research. periodDuring the analogous periods of their presidencies, Obama held 86 short Q&A sessions. George W. Bush did 286 and the famously chatty Clinton conducted 461.

These informal sessions, in crowded spaces and often over the din of helicopter noise, represent a free-for-all that “the president can use to give an impression of an out-of-control press that he must tame in his role of ringmaster,” Kumar said.

Add to that his beloved Twitter account: Since the start of 2019, Trump has tweeted an average of 18 times a day, by Kumar’s count.

Trump allies see it all as evidence of the president bringing his communication prowess to Washington. “He already had many of these skills having spent the last four decades living on the front page of New York City newspapers and tabloids,” said Jason Miller, chief spokesman for the Trump campaign during the fall of 2016. “He has very clearly figured out how the D.C. media game works, as far as the timing of stories, and what influences news cycles.”

The Trump communication skill set, however, has not been enough to halt the impeachment inquiry. A whistleblower kicked off the investigation — followed by diplomats, national security staffers and State Department officials backing up key details of the original complaint. It’s an information stream Trump has not figured out how to disrupt.

The White House has yet to settle on a single legal or political strategy to fight impeachment, with the West Wing riven by turf battles. Trump alone drives the impeachment message, but he often creates it on the fly reacting to newspaper headlines or TV networks. The approach leaves staffers frequently caught off guard as to where the day will lead.

The White House press office did not respond to requests for comment.

Reacting in real time to headlines is likely to increase Wednesday once Democrats begin public hearings for the impeachment inquiry. The person close to the president said he fully expects Trump to live-tweet throughout them.

On Friday, after his GOP allies pressed for weeks to open up the closed-door hearings, Trump said “they shouldn’t be having public hearings” at all and referred to them as a “hoax” amid a strong stock market and employment numbers.

Lately, the White House has been trying to play up its policy work as Trump comes across as a man consumed by impeachment. He is scheduled to give a talk about the state of the economy at the Economic Club of New York on Tuesday, and last week, he hosted a ceremony at the White House to show off Republicans’ historic record of confirming conservative judges.

Support among Republican lawmakers appears strong so far. Trump has launched a charm offensive to woo congressmen and senators through lunches in the Roosevelt Room, visits to the White House, phone calls and trips to Camp David, with the understanding that his political future hinges on a potential impeachment trial and vote in the Senate during which Republicans will need to remain unified.

INTERACTIVE: The most powerful players in Donald Trump's impeachment inquiry

Trump and his allies still want to see more Republicans on TV and out in public defending him, particularly lawmakers and members of the legal community including attorneys general and members of the conservative Federalist Society.

“Leonard Leo has gotten everything he wanted from the Trump administration, and he has not lifted a finger to help when it matters most,” said a Republican close to the administration about the executive director of the Federalist Society. Leo was intimately involved in the battles to confirm Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and is well-known to the president and top aides in the White House.

A spokesman for Leo strongly disputed this criticism. “Some people pontificate and beat their chest while others work quietly and effectively. Leonard’s support for the president has been clear from the time the president was a candidate, then during the transition, through dozens of judicial confirmations and to this date,” said Keith Appell, a spokesman who works with Leo.

The conservative legal movement, behind the scenes, has also been working hard to help with the impeachment battle, said a conservative leader. This includes ongoing polling by the Judicial Crisis Network and Republican former attorneys general including former acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker appearing on TV and writing op-eds to defend the president.

So far, Trump has exploited social media and the world of communications quite effectively, said Kathleen Jamieson, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication. “Having ongoing contact with your constituency can create a protective envelope around him,” she said. “A loyal Twitter following means he can sidestep any critics and mainstream media.”

The drawback is that the approach leaves little space for other Republicans, including lawmakers, to navigate the political world during impeachment or explain away Trump’s gaffes.

“Republicans have to govern out of the world in which Trump has constructed an alternative reality,” Jamieson said, and until there is a Democratic nominee, it’s hard to tell how that reality will stand up in the next election.

Daniel Lippman contributed to this report.