The Biden administration has promised to ramp up the U.S. supply of COVID-19 vaccine doses. Also, Senator Patrick Leahy was hospitalized just hours after presiding over the opening of former President Donald Trump's impeachment trial. All that and all that matters in today's Eye Opener. Your world in 90 seconds.

The "Trump defense" is taking shape among some alleged Capitol rioters.

Republicans need to flip just one seat next year to win back the Senate majority. But retirements are already complicating their path back to power.

Two of the three toughest GOP defensive states on the 2022 Senate map, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, are already open seats, with GOP Sens. Pat Toomey and Richard Burr not planning to run again. That leaves Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson as the most vulnerable Republican up for reelection, but Johnson hasn’t even decided to run for a third term after previously pledging to serve just two. And he said Tuesday he’s in no hurry to decide.

“There are some that want me to run, some that don’t,” Johnson said of Republican entreaties to recruit him to run for a third term. “From my standpoint, I don’t feel under pressure that I have to decide really quick.”

The effort to retain Republicans who have won races in tough states came into focus on Monday when Sen. Rob Portman surprised Republicans by announcing he won’t seek a third term in Ohio. Republicans will still be favored in the Buckeye State but will now have to contend with a primary that already looks crowded, with a laundry list of Republicans considering or already taking steps towards running.

And there’s already concern that more could join him in running to the exits as the GOP prepares to serve in the minority for the first time since 2013. Next year's Senate map has enough swing states that Republicans could retake the majority — but they could just as easily lose more seats.

So senior Republicans hope if anyone else is planning to bow out, they announce it soon — like Portman did this year, and not like former Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe did in 2012 when she retired two weeks before the filing deadline.

“It’s harder when you have open seats than when you have incumbents up, so I hope we don’t have any more,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), who ran his party’s campaign arm in 2010 and 2012. “If they are going to retire, I think it’s the right thing to do to do it early to give other people a chance to get in.”

Yet Johnson and other undecided senators don’t seem to be in a rush. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who is 87, said to check in with him “several months from now.” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), the No. 4 GOP leader, said he didn’t have a particular timetable on when to make an official decision. Missouri is a red state, and Republicans would be favored there, though Blunt only narrowly won in 2016.

“I’m still planning to run. But that will become official when I announce a campaign. And I’m not doing that yet,” Blunt said. “I really have not been thinking much about it to tell you the truth. ... I keep thinking there will be a little breathing space, so far it’s not happening.”

Republican strategists and advisers said the concern about a wave of retirements stems from the party losing the majority unexpectedly in Georgia earlier this month, with senators who were poised for two more years in power suddenly relegated to minority status, and the Capitol besieged by a violent mob the following day.

Moreover, the GOP is settling in for its second impeachment trial and just spent the better part of five years answering questions about Trump’s combative rhetoric, erratic policy decisions and occasional broadsides against members of his own party.

“After the riot and four years of Trump, what GOP senator up in 2022 hasn’t thought about leaving?” said T.J. Petrizzo, a Republican lobbyist and donor.

For now, much of the focus is on Johnson, whom new National Republican Senatorial Committee Chair Rick Scott (R-Fla.) started trying to convince to run again in the fall of last year.

Bill McCoshen, a veteran GOP strategist in Wisconsin, said Republican grassroots in the state are hoping he seeks a third term and viewed some of his recent comments about the 50-50 split in the chamber as positive signs.

“The grassroots wants to see him run again, and they think he's starting to make a pivot towards doing that,” McCoshen said. “I think he understands the importance of his seat for Republicans hopes of regaining the majority in 2022, and the grassroots hopes he's reconsidering not running.”

Other senators on the retirement watch list include 80-year-old Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), who has served since 1975 and just became the Senate president pro tempore for the second time. Leahy was hospitalized Tuesday after feeling ill on the advice of the Senate's attending physician, according to a statement from his office. On the Republican side, 86-year-old Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) is seen as a possible retirement, though his seat would be safely Republican. Shelby said he will address his future after the impeachment trial.

Grassley, who would be in his 90s for much of a potential eighth term, doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about: “I’ve done it seven times. It’s no different than other times,” he said Tuesday. Grassley’s grandson, Pat Grassley, is the Iowa state House speaker and could succeed him.

The House Republican caucus was also plagued by a wave of retirements in 2018 that ultimately contributed to losing the chamber. But with Democrats only controlling a 50-50 Senate and facing a midterm election with a Democrat in the White House, Republicans’ straightforward path back to the majority probably prevents a wider rush to the exits.

“The big change here is going from the majority to the minority,” said Scott Reed, a veteran GOP operative and former top political strategist at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “It's no fun being in the minority as the ranking member. You lose all your power.”

Reed, however, downplayed any concerns about the effect retirements could have on their prospects in 2022.

“I don't think this is cause for panic, at all,” he said.

Chris Hartline, a spokesperson for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, also dismissed the notion that retirements would be an issue.

“We are confident that we’ll get strong candidates in all of these states, and they will present a clear alternative to the Democrats’ radical agenda to fundamentally change America,” Hartline said in a statement. “And we’re confident that we’ll hold these seats and win back the majority.”

In some ways the 2022 election will be unlike any other. Trump has indicated he will continue to play in primaries and tank the prospects of those who have defied him.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was the only GOP senator up for reelection that voted against dismissing Trump’s second trial as unconstitutional. She reiterated she’s running for reelection on Tuesday: “How come everyone’s asking me this today?”

“An impeachment doesn’t come about at a convenient time for people’s campaign schedules,” Murkowski said of whether her vote will hurt her prospects in Alaska. She won reelection in 2010, even after losing her primary to a right-wing candidate and being forced to run a write-in campaign in the general election.

Republicans are hopeful that despite all that Trump has done to change the party, the approaching midterms will be conventional. They’re already indicating they’re running against Biden’s agenda and banking on 2022 following precedent, with the party out of power making gains.

After all, the GOP only needs to pick up one seat for a majority and has opportunities in Nevada, Arizona, New Hampshire and Georgia, among others.

“I think it’s going to be a good term for us because we’re in the middle of a Democratic president’s term, one who is bent on destroying the economy. I think we’ll have the momentum,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.).

Cramer said he's not overly concerned about retirements but conceded: “It’s easy for me to say. John Hoeven’s running in North Dakota.”

For a moment, it looked like Donald Trump might be losing his iron grip on the GOP. In the wake of the deadly Capitol riot, 10 House Republicans joined Democrats in their vote to impeach him. Several other Republicans openly suggested at least censuring the president.

Not anymore.

Local and state Republican parties are censuring Republicans for disloyalty in states across the country. The lawmakers who broke with him are weathering a storm of criticism from Trump-adoring constituents at home, with punitive primary challenges already taking shape. In Washington, party leaders who once suggested Trump bore some responsibility for the Jan. 6 violence are backtracking.

On Tuesday, 45 Republican senators — all but five members of the GOP conference — voted that putting a former president on trial for impeachment is unconstitutional, all but guaranteeing the Senate won’t convict him. If the Republican Party seemed to be at a crossroads about its post-Trump future, it now appears to have concluded in which direction to travel.

“There is a level of support for this president more than during the election,” said Don Thrasher, chair of Kentucky’s Nelson County Republican Party, which recently voted to censure minority leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentuckian, for what Thrasher called “impugning the president’s honor” in debate over certifying the election results.

Of the post-presidential fervor for Trump, he said, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

The devotion to Trump, however, comes at great expense. The party risks tying its future to a one-term president whose deeply polarizing style cost the party both the House and the Senate during his four years in office. And he blew a hole in the party’s suburban foundation that might be irreparable.

Trump’s place in the party’s landscape appeared less certain after his November defeat and the Capitol insurrection that he helped to fuel with his false claims of a stolen election. Polls suggested Trump’s influence over the GOP was beginning to fade.

But the GOP is still a party in which Trump’s approval rating stands at about 80 percent. For Trump loyalists, Trump’s second impeachment has been taken less as an indictment of the former president’s behavior than a cause to rally around him — a martyr for an aggrieved populist base.

“There are 74 million people who voted for him,” said Charlie Gerow, a Pennsylvania-based Republican strategist. “You’re not going to get a mass exodus … At the grassroots level, he’s very, very popular, and I think the party as a whole understands that in order to be a majority party, it’s going to have to include those Trump enthusiasts.”

The real question now may not be how long Trump looms over the GOP, but whether there is room beneath his shadow for anyone else.

In Washington state, several Republican Party county chairs called Monday for the resignation of Republican Rep. Dan Newhouse, who voted for impeachment. The Republican Party of Oregon formally condemned “the betrayal” of the 10 House members who voted to impeach. Over the weekend, Arizona Republicans, despite watching their party founder during the Trump era, voted to censure Cindy McCain, former Sen. Jeff Flake and Gov. Doug Ducey, while reelecting a Trump loyalist, Kelli Ward, as state party chair.

And in Wyoming — a state that went 70 percent for Trump in November — the Republican Party of Carbon County voted to censure the state’s representative, Liz Cheney, for her vote to impeach Trump.

Joey Correnti, the Carbon County chair, ranked Trump in his “top five” presidents of all time.

As for the GOP’s posture toward the former president, he said, “If you’re going to receive the benefit of the brand, you ride with the brand.”

In recent weeks, the party’s governing class appears to have taken note of the base’s sustained fealty to Trump — and the impact it could have on their own political prospects. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy said after the insurrection at the Capitol that Trump bore some responsibility for the riot. But then the California Republican said “everybody across this country has some responsibility,” and he otherwise labored to mend his relationship with Trump.

Nor are the Republican Party’s leading contenders for president in 2024 eager to cross Trump. Former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley lit into Trump following the Capitol riot, telling Republican National Committee members that his “actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.”

More recently, on Fox News, she said, “I don’t even think there’s a basis for impeachment.”

“At some point, I mean, give the man a break,” Haley said. “I mean, move on.”

Many traditionalist Republicans are hoping that’s exactly what GOP voters will do. Republicans down-ballot were more successful than Trump in the November election. Scores of Republican voters cast ballots for candidates not named Trump — and do not concern themselves with the local party operations that are fuming at more moderate Republicans.

“The crackpot base that are Trump’s people, that are Trump’s wing men and wing women, will never leave him,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican political strategist in Arizona. But though “Trump still has a hold on the core base of Republicans,” Marson said, “In the larger Republican Party, that is not the case.”

Still, the most Trumpian, activist wing of the party controls many state and county party operations. And the once-fringe forces unleashed during the Trump era have metastasized within the party.

Millions of Republicans bought into Trump’s lie that the November election was stolen from him, with a large majority of Republicans saying after the election that they did not think it was free or fair. In Hawaii, a Republican Party official resigned recently after posting tweets sympathetic to subscribers to the QAnon conspiracy theory. The Texas Republican Party continues to use the “We are the storm” slogan, despite criticism about the phrase’s links to QAnon [The party has denied a connection].

Sean Walsh, a Republican strategist who worked in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush White Houses, suggested Trump’s pull on the party was so great that “you have to ease out of Donald Trump.”

“Many in the party kind of quietly hope that he goes away, and they can transition to the future,” Walsh said.

However, he said, “Elections are decided on such a thin margin in states, you don’t have to make too many activists angry to where it has a real meaningful and life-altering impact on your electoral future if you’re a politician. Darwin and politics are very similar: You have to survive to move on. And you can’t survive if you go out and dump on Trump hard.”

For Republicans who bucked Trump and faced recriminations from within the party, that has been the lesson of the last three weeks. Trump, despite his departure from Washington, remains close to the center of the GOP political universe.

Solomon Yue, the Republican national committee person from Oregon who pushed the resolution in his state condemning the 10 impeachment-supporting House Republicans, described the Republicans’ pro-impeachment vote as reflecting a lack of courage, which he said is “not made out of chickens---.”

Like other Trump supporters, Yue suspects Trump’s stature in the party will only improve over time, as Republicans who held off voting for Trump recoil from the Democratic agenda advanced by Joe Biden.

In Kentucky, where McConnell is the godfather of the state party, he nevertheless faced the prospect Saturday of a resolution urging him to oppose impeachment. While the state party ruled it out of order, the mere challenge to his authority raised eyebrows. And he was still taking flak at the county level, where Thrasher said he has been coordinating with other county chairs on a measure to rebuke him. The chair of a neighboring county party told Thrasher one of his constituents, an elderly woman supportive of Trump, asked if they couldn’t have McConnell “tarred and feathered,” while volunteering to “pour on the tar” herself.

Trump has kept an unusually low profile since leaving office, but he has indicated a desire to remain a force in Republican politics. If he rises up — whether supporting pro-Trump Republicans in primaries in 2022 or as a candidate himself in 2024 — whole swaths of the party may bend at his direction.

Trump “can intervene in pretty much any state operation — or at least 90 percent of the states,” Thrasher said. “If he interjected himself in any of the state party elections, it would go in his favor … I know in Kentucky, if he called for the removal of the whole apparatus, we’d vote them out.”

CNN's Chris Cuomo reacts after 45 out of 50 Republican senators voted to dismiss former President Trump's impeachment trial just after being sworn in and promising to be impartial.