After a midterm elections performance that left one Republican governor openly declaring it "time to get off the Trump Titanic", the former president is said to be privately fuming.
Despite Donald Trump's prediction of a "big, beautiful red wave" that would see Republicans flip dozens of seats to gain control of the US Senate and House of Representatives, the electoral map tells a different story.
And several influential conservative newspapers are telling one of their own.
While counting continues in several key states, the front page of the Murdoch-owned New York Post screamed "Toxic Trump" on Thursday.
"Mr Trump could have stayed quiet in the final weeks of the campaign except to spend money to help his candidates," declared the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, another Murdoch masthead, in a scathing op-ed the same day.
"But he did little of the latter and instead staged rallies that played into Democratic hands."
The Democrats are still expected to lose control of the House, but by much slimmer margins than many foresaw heading into the election.
Thanks to a win against Trump-endorsed Mehmet Oz in the swing state of Pennsylvania, there is still a chance that President Joe Biden's party will hold on to control in the Senate.
"It was a bad showing for Republicans and particularly for Trump Republicans — those far-right, election-denying, anti-democratic Trump candidates, it was a relatively bad election for them," said Emma Shortis, a historian and US politics expert from RMIT.
"It was much worse than many experts, myself included, were expecting."
The balance of power in the Senate could now come down to a run-off in the state of Georgia, where another Trump favourite, Herschel Walker, is challenging Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock.
Whether Trump will insert himself further into that race after his hand-picked candidates underperformed elsewhere is an open question.
On his social media platform, Trump described the results mildly, as "somewhat disappointing", but advisers told reporters the former president was "livid" and "screaming at everyone" behind closed doors.
The Donald, the Dobbs decision that toppled a constitutional right to an abortion, threats to democracy or some combination of all three likely took the edge off Democrats' losses.
"Abortion was a huge motivator for Democrats in this," said David Smith from the US Studies Centre.
"There was an exit poll showing that three out of 10 people said that abortion was the most important issue.
"It's another issue that ties Republicans to Trump. The reason why that decision was made was because as president, Trump installed a conservative super-majority in the Supreme Court."
But with Trump's "very big announcement" scheduled for early next week, some Republican operatives are wondering if another Trump presidential run is the right move for 2024.
Trump went on an endorsement spree — and in some cases, it backfired
In previous years, winning a majority in the House would have been a "prize in itself", according to Republican strategist John Feehery.
He argues the number one lesson for his party this election cycle is not to "over-promise and under-deliver".
"One of the things that happens in an election is when you do not exceed expectations, you really put yourself in a world of hurt," he said.
Mr Feehery believes abortion rights likely played a bigger role at the ballot box than Republicans predicted, but the "quality" of candidates also had an impact.
The former president doled out endorsements left, right and centre ahead of the midterms — especially to those willing to embrace his narrative the presidency was "stolen" from him two years ago.
"President Trump became an issue in this campaign — even though he wasn't on the ballot and isn't in power — and he inserted himself in the campaign in ways that were not helpful," Mr Feheery said.
Among the candidates with Trump's tick of approval were a venture capitalist who has promoted the "great replacement" conspiracy theory, a former football pro accused of domestic violence, and a combat veteran who chartered a bus to the Capitol on January 6.
Just over half had never held political office before.
Not all of Trump's primaries picks made it to midterms, but hundreds of Republicans who ran for the House, Senate and state posts, such as governor and secretary of state, had outright denied or cast doubt over the outcome of the 2020 election.
At least 150 election deniers have won their races. But several high-profile Trump endorsees underperformed.
The former president is reportedly particularly displeased with the performance of celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz, who lost the Pennsylvania Senate spot to Democrat John Fetterman.
Dr Oz had rhetorically distanced himself from the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement in the final days of the race, pitching himself as a consensus-seeking moderate and revealing he would have voted to certify Joe Biden's election in 2021.
But he appeared alongside Trump at an 11th-hour rally.
Ultimately, Pennsylvania voters backed Fetterman, allowing the Democrats to flip the crucial state.
Bucking national trends, more Pennsylvania voters said abortion — rather than inflation — was the most important issue to them.
The swing state also voted against Trump's pick for governor, Doug Mastriano, who had advocated for women violating a proposed abortion ban to face charges of murder.
Michigan voted to enshrine abortion rights in the state's constitution, and re-elected Democrat governor Gretchen Whitmer over her Trump-backed rival Tudor Dixon, who supported a near-total ban without exceptions for child victims of rape and incest.
Arizona's Kari Lake, a former TV anchor who has embraced the nickname 'Trump in a dress', was trailing her opponent for governor by just 62 votes on Wednesday, but remained confident she would "win big" once all the ballots were in.
The gap widened and by Friday, Lake was still behind by a few thousand votes.
The state's Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters, who Trump urged to "go stronger" on 2020 election denial during the campaign, was also behind the incumbent Democrat, Mark Kelly.
And in Georgia, more than 200,000 voters who backed Republican Brian Kemp for governor did not vote for Herschel Walker, the party's Trump-backed candidate in the Senate.
Is Trump the election's 'biggest loser'?
With inflation at a 40-year high and abortion access no longer guaranteed for the first time in generations, it may be overly simplistic to pin the surprising outcome of a consequential election on the whims of one man.
But in its recent op-ed, the Wall Street Journal's conservative editorial board didn't mince words.
"Trump is the Republican Party's biggest loser" it declared in the headline, adding: "He has now flopped in 2018, 2020, 2021 and 2022."
While midterms are usually seen as a report card on the current president's first two years in office, it was Biden's predecessor that turned voters off, the board wrote.
"What will Democrats do when Donald Trump isn't around to lose elections?" it pondered.
Certainly, if Republicans had made sweeping gains, Trump would have claimed the credit, fairly or not.
And now he is copping at least some of the blame.
But Matthew Gertz, a senior fellow at progressive media watchdog Media Matters, rejects the idea that Trump's influence has waned among his supporters or in the Murdoch media machine, particularly at Fox News.
"Looking back before the election, the anticipation on the right — and frankly across much of the press — was the Democrats were going to have a devastatingly bad night," Mr Gertz said.
"I think what this shows is that the types of candidates that are favoured — both by Trump and by Fox News hosts like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity — can be a major force in winning primary elections and winning the support of Republican voters.
"But when they are forced to grapple with a Democratic opponent, they may come up short."
Despite losing the House in 2018, then the White House in 2020, and potentially failing to capture the Senate in 2022, the Republican party appears rusted on to its current kingmaker.
Mr Gertz says the "cult of personality" around Donald Trump means their fates remain tied, even though a cohort of donors and commentators on the right might want to go in a different direction.
"Everyone's sort of waiting for everyone else to go first," he said.
Mr Gertz places the Wall Street Journal and New York Post on the "anti-anti-Trump" side of the conservative media ecosystem, which disavows and embraces the former president, depending on the news cycle.
"They don't support him. They don't oppose him. They oppose the people who oppose him," Mr Gertz said.
"It's never the most prominent parts of the Murdoch empire.
"It's never the Fox News prime-time hosts who are coming out and trying to criticise Donald Trump and cut ties with him."
And yet, in recent days another Fox News regular, Florida's Governor Ron DeSantis, has emerged as the biggest threat to Trump's stranglehold.
Mr Gertz predicts a "civil war" would break out at the cable network, if the younger governor were to go up against his former mentor in earnest for the 2024 nomination, with different hosts' loyalties pulling them in different directions.
"It would become very messy, very quickly," he said.
"And then, frankly, from my perspective, be a lot of fun to watch."
Will Trump's apprentice, Ron DeSantis, turn on his master?
For all the false starts, DeSantis delivered one of the Republicans' most successful results at the midterms.
The Florida governor was re-elected in a landslide, defeating his Democrat opponent Charlie Crist by 1.5 million votes in a contest that he only narrowly won four years ago.
The Republican has been fuelling speculation that he has his sights set on higher office, slowly distancing himself from Trump and reimagining his personal brand.
In his election night victory speech, DeSantis declared war on the "woke agenda" and described Florida as "a ray of hope" for the "revival of true American principles".
And while all signs point to a future presidential bid, taking on Trump in 2024 would almost certainly be ugly.
The former president, who was central to DeSantis surviving the 2018 midterms, has foreshadowed a messy battle should his former ally decide to run against him.
"Trump has already come up with a derogatory nickname for DeSantis, calling him "DeSanctimonious", and we've seen in the past that when Republicans try to take Trump off directly, they get destroyed," Dr Smith said.
"It's kind of a terrible dilemma for DeSantis to be in, even though he's just had this amazing victory.
"A lot of people will be pushing for him to get into the race. At the same time, he could really get damaged by getting into that race."
Trump told Fox News this week that if DeSantis did choose to run for president, "he could hurt himself very badly", issuing a veiled threat to smear his opponent.
"[If he did run], I would tell you things about him that won't be very flattering. I know more about him than anybody — other than, perhaps, his wife," he said.
DeSantis is not the only Republican being named as a possible contender to take on Trump in the primary.
His former vice-president Mike Pence has just written a memoir about his experiences in the Trump White House, and urged Republicans to resist "the siren song of unprincipled populism that's unmoored from our oldest traditions and most cherished values".
Other potential Republican rivals include former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former diplomat Nikki Haley.
But Dr Smith remains unconvinced any Republican, even DeSantis, can loosen the tight grip Trump still has on the party.
"Trump inspires this almost religious commitment in his followers. And that's not something that DeSantis can really match," he said.
"If there was a primary tomorrow, Trump would still beat DeSantis."
Trump may face an uphill battle, but he's not likely to back down
While commentators from both sides of the political spectrum agree this was a bad week for Trump, there are still two years to go before the presidential election.
Dr Smith notes Trump has a long history of overcoming scandals and challenges that would end the careers of many other politicians.
"I think that we've now reached one of these inflection points when it looks like party elites could turn against Trump," Dr Smith said.
"We've seen that before — after the January 6 riots, for example — where they realise that he's actually really damaging the party, and there's a chance to get rid of him.
"They haven't done that in the past. And I don't know if they're going to do it this time."
While Trump may remain the frontrunner for the Republican nomination in 2024, the early results of these midterm elections suggest he has a fight on his hands to win back the White House.
Winning enough independent voters to overcome an enthusiastic Democratic base will be key to a Trump victory.
But Dr Shortis cautioned that Trump's political power should never be underestimated.
"It's amazing that people are still willing to predict that Trump will disappear, that he's finished when people have been doing that for six or seven years now, and it hasn't happened," she said.
"I'm not suggesting that he will be president in 2024, or anything like that. But he's not going anywhere. He's not leaving the news cycle."
