The New York Post, a Rupert Murdoch-owned newspaper that’s long voiced its support for Donald Trump, shared a scathing cover of the former president that showed those loyalties may be eroding.
On Thursday, the right-leaning News Corp-owned paper published a stunning cover that featured a caricature of the one-term president precariously placed atop a wall with a headline that read, “TRUMPTY DUMPTY”, an allusion to the nursery rhyme character, Humpty Dumpty, who, as the poem goes, “had a great fall”.
“Don (who couldn’t build a great wall) had a great fall - can all the GOP’s men put the party back together again?” the front page headline continued, giving more than a heavy-handed hint that the newspaper does not endorse Mr Trump for another term, like they did in 2020.
The New York Post’s damning rebuke of the 45th president was just one of many news outlets and conservative pundits who seemed to put the blame of the Republican party’s poor showing on Tuesday at his feet, as Fox News – another Murdoch-owned news outlet – similarly began pulling the camera away from Mr Trump and towards other GOP hopefuls.
Former press secretary for Mr Trump, Kayleigh McEnany, who now works for Fox News, advised on air that Mr Trump should hold off on announcing his campaign for the Oval Office in 2024 until after the Georgia Senate runoff.
“I think he needs to put it on pause,” she said. When asked whether Mr Trump should campaign in the state, she said: “I think we’ve got to make strategic calculations. Governor [Ron] DeSantis, I think he should be welcomed to the state, given what happened last night. You’ve got to look at the realities on the ground.”
The chorus of criticism directed at the twice-impeached president came from some of the former president’s closest advisers, which included figures like former Trump aide Jason Miller, who even spent the night with the former president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, and David Urban, a long-time adviser with deep ties in Pennsylvania.
“Republicans have followed Donald Trump off the side of a cliff,” said Mr Urban in an interview with The New York Times.
Former Representative Peter King, another previously solid Trump supporter, said, “I strongly believe he should no longer be the face of the Republican Party,” and added that the GOP “can’t become a personality cult.”
It’s hardly the first time that allies of the former president have turned against him, as there was a similar effort underway in the weeks leading up to 6 January 2021 when conservatives and supporters of the then-president voiced concern for his seeming inability to accept defeat in the election.
“We understand, Mr President, that you’re angry that you lost. But to continue down this road is ruinous. We offer this as a newspaper that endorsed you, that supported you,” read an editorial from The New York Post in late December 2020, acknowledging that only weeks before the newspaper had endorsed him for a second term.
More recently, the editorial pages of the New York Post have given signals of increasing hostilities in the Murdoch-Trump union (mainly on the newspaper owner’s side), with one op-ed from June calling the 45th president a “prisoner of his own ego”.
And then on Wednesday, Piers Morgan, a conservative commentator who often pens opinion pieces for Murdoch’s New York Post, once again called for “dumping” Trump and embracing Mr DeSantis.
“Make no mistake, these results represent a crushing political smackdown for Trump,” wrote Mr Morgan, while citing several of his recent editorials that concluded much the same thing that he was writing Wednesday.
“Ron DeSantis has now proved he’s got what it takes to drive the Republican Party forward, right at the moment Donald Trump’s now proved all he’s got is bitterly dragging the party back to past failures and a democracy-denying state of unelectable inertia,” concluded Mr Morgan, seeming to echo many of the paper’s executives who have long been calling for the same embrace of the Florida Republican.
