A prominent Republican influencer, who frequently supports President Donald Trump, used his podcast and X on Wednesday to argue that the GOP leader risks alienating his base by appearing “impotent.”
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Erick Erickson, a conservative commentator who went from opposing Trump in 2016 to endorsing him in both 2020 and 2024, talked on his podcast about how voters perceive Trump as failing to help them with their economic problems or winning the Iran war he chose to wage. The pundit even questioned whether Trump’s struggles in Iran are due to a munitions shortage, and added that even Trump’s attempts to prosecute his perceived political enemies have overwhelmingly fallen short.
“When you keep claiming you can do stuff that you really can’t do, you eventually instill in your base that you’re impotent, and they’ll seek out someone else,” Erickson warned on X.
Erickson is not the first commentator to use the term “impotent” to describe Trump’s current term. In June Nick Catoggio from the conservative publication The Dispatch used Trump’s failure to renovate the Reflecting Pool as a symbol of his perceived impotence.
“Between the war on algae and the war abroad, Trump has never looked more pitifully impotent than he does right now,” Catoggio argued. “The perfect metaphor for his first year back in office came when, without warning, he demolished the East Wing to make way for his precious ballroom. That episode captured the political zeitgeist of 2025: Americans had elected a caudillo who cared not a bit about the country’s civic traditions and would bulldoze them—literally—to get what he wanted, whether the other branches liked it or not.”
He added, “The reflecting-pool idiocy is the perfect metaphor for his presidency in 2026, coinciding as it does with our national humiliation in Iran. Postliberalism promises effective problem-solving through energetic authoritarianism, but as things stand, not only can’t the authoritarian in chief forcibly open the Strait of Hormuz, he can’t even successfully clean a public pool in D.C. The zeitgeist has flipped.”
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In 2025 Editorial Board editor John Stoehr similarly argued that the president has displayed his impotence, on that occasion by failing to quell ongoing accusations that he sexually assaulted underage girls with his longtime friend, the late child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“As far as MAGA is concerned, every question about the Epstein scandal is downstream from the fact that Trump didn’t use the power he was given to do what he was supposed to do,” Stoehr wrote. “Even if Trump manages to paper over the scandal – by getting convicted child-sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell to say nice things about him, for instance – he still can’t explain his impotence. Indeed, the more he papers it over, the more he deepens the appearance among his own people that he’s weak.”
Also in 2025, conservative commentator Joe Perticone from The Bulwark said that Trump’s control over the House of Representatives had rendered House Speaker Mike Johnson into someone politically impotent.
“Mike Johnson’s speakership is somewhat different from all these,” Perticone opined. “His overriding project has been to cede whatever power and decision-making he can to the White House, and this has, in turn, given shape to an unusual legacy, one defined by impotence.”
He continued, “In recent months there has been a strange spirit of bipartisanship among frustrated House members, who have relied on the previously rare tactic of discharge petitions to circumvent Johnson. The latest such bill directly pushes back on the Donald Trump administration in a policy area the MAGA movement finds particularly divisive: aid to Ukraine.”
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