Sign up for the daily Inside Washington email for exclusive US coverage and analysis delivered to your inbox
Get our free Inside Washington email
The New York Post, a Rupert Murdoch newspaper that has long voiced its support for Donald Trump, shared a scathing cover story of the former president that suggested those tracks may be eroding. On Thursday, the News Corp-owned newspaper ran a stunning cover featuring a caricature of the one-term president perched precariously on a wall with a headline that read, “TRUMPTY DUMPTY,” an allusion to the nursery rhyme character, Humpty Dumpty, the who, as the poem says, “had a great fall”. “Don (who couldn’t build a great wall) had a big fall – can all the men of the GOP put the party back together?” the front-page headline continued, giving little more than a heavy hint that the paper is not endorsing Mr. Trump for another term, as they did in 2020. The New York Post’s scathing rebuke of the 45th president was just one of several news outlets and conservative pundits who appeared to lay the blame for the GOP’s poor showing Tuesday at his feet, as did Fox News — another agency owned by Murdoch. began pulling the camera away from Mr. Trump and toward other GOP candidates. Former Trump press secretary Kaylee McEnany, who now works for Fox News, advised on air that Trump should hold off on announcing his 2024 Oval Office campaign until the Georgia Senate runoff. “I think he should put it on hold,” he said. Asked whether Mr Trump should campaign in the state, he said: “I think we have to make strategic calculations. Governor [Ron] DeSantis, I think we should welcome him to the state given what happened last night. You have to look at the reality on the ground.” The chorus of criticism directed at the twice-impeached president came from some of the former president’s closest advisers, including the likes of former Trump aide Jason Miller, who even spent the night with the former president at Mar’s club. -a-Lago in Florida. , and David Urban, a longtime consultant with deep Pennsylvania ties. “Republicans have followed Donald Trump to the edge of a cliff,” Mr. Urban said in an interview with The New York Times. Former Rep. Peter King, another previously staunch Trump supporter, said: “I strongly believe that he should no longer be the face of the Republican Party,” and added that the GOP “cannot become a cult of personality.” This is hardly the first time the former president’s allies have turned on him, as there was a similar effort underway in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, when conservatives and supporters of the then-president expressed concern over his apparent inability to accept defeat. . in the elections. “We understand, Mr. President, that you are angry that you lost. But to continue on this path is destructive. We offer it as the paper that endorsed you, that endorsed you,” read a New York Post article in late December 2020, acknowledging that just weeks earlier the paper had endorsed him for a second term. More recently, the New York Post’s editorial pages signaled growing hostilities in the Murdoch-Trump union (mostly on the part of the paper’s owner), with an op-ed from June calling the 45th president “a prisoner of his ego. “. And then on Wednesday, Piers Morgan, a conservative commentator who often writes opinion pieces for Murdoch’s New York Post, once again called for Trump to “dump” and embrace Mr. DeSantis. “Make no mistake, these results represent a crushing political blow to Trump,” Mr. Morgan wrote, citing several of his recent op-eds that reached much the same conclusion he wrote on Wednesday. “Ron DeSandis has now proven that he has what it takes to lead the Republican Party forward, at a time when Donald Trump has proven that all he has is to bitterly drag the party back to past failures and a state of of unelected inaction that denies democracy,” he concluded. Mr. Morgan appears to echo many of the paper’s executives who have long called for the same embrace as the Florida Republican.
