Donald Trump blamed Republican candidates for their election losses on Truth Social, and he singled out Texas Governor Greg Abbott as the first target. Abbott’s defeat marks the first time a Democrat has won the Texas governor’s seat in more than 30 years, and Trump made clear he had little patience for the result.

“If Greg Abbott, the Governor of Texas, hadn’t become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life, he wouldn’t have lost,” Trump wrote. “He went back to his original formula, and it wasn’t pretty!”

The term RINO, short for Republican In Name Only, is used by party members against those they consider disloyal to the Republican Party. Trump was not just throwing a punch at a rival. He was turning the blame inward, arguing that a Republican governor who had strayed from the party line paid the price at the ballot box.

Trump said he would have won if he had been on the ballot. Speaking to CBS News, he distanced himself from several other Republican candidates who contested the election. “In some cases they [voters] didn’t like the candidates, and in some cases those candidates were not my friend,” he said.

“We would have won easily if I was on the ballot. But I wasn’t.”

That line will likely draw the most attention. It is a clear message that the former president sees himself as the party’s deciding factor, and that the candidates who ran without his direct backing were on their own. He did not explain which candidates he meant beyond the general criticism, and the quote stands as his own assessment of the results.

Fox News took heavy fire too. Trump lambasted the network over the evening in several Truth Social posts. He criticised Fox for “spending too much time” covering the Democrats, and he claimed the outlet’s poor ratings were “way down, not because of me, but because they are AGAINST me!”

The attack is striking because Fox News is one of the most-watched conservative outlets in the country, and Trump has spent years relying on its audience. Turning on it during a night of Republican losses shows how quickly the party’s internal fights are spilling into public view.

He also went after Bill de Blasio. Trump was unhappy that Fox News had interviewed former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio, whom he called “the Worst Mayor” in the history of New York City. “He left the City in disgrace and the damage he caused was incalculable,” Trump wrote.

The choice to criticise a booking decision, rather than the election itself, shows where Trump’s anger was focused on the night. The posts moved quickly from candidate performance to media coverage, with each target in the lineup getting its own rebuke.

The overall picture is a president-level figure lashing out at people on his own side. He blamed a Republican governor for losing, distanced himself from other Republican candidates, and attacked a conservative news network that gave airtime to a political opponent. Each post added another layer to a message that the party’s results were, in his view, someone else’s failure.

Trump’s posts were a single night’s outburst, but they point to a sharper split inside the Republican coalition. Abbott’s loss in Texas is the most consequential result in the posts, because it breaks a three-decade streak that party loyalists have long treated as a given in the state. How Republican leaders respond to Trump’s blame game will show whether the rift stays on social media or moves into the party’s campaign planning.