President Donald Trump’s increasingly bizarre behavior has begun to weird out even his most faithful followers.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson warned Trump that he could see religious conservatives turn against him over his unhinged social media post depicting himself as Jesus Christ and his tense clashes with the first American pontiff.
“He’s forcing his supporters into awkward places, and if they don’t support him, he attacks them. This is not a way to sustain a coalition,” he told The Washington Post. “These things add up in a way that begins to alienate evangelical voters.”
Erickson, an influential voice in evangelical circles who bills himself as a “conservative truth-teller,” previously said Trump voters are “not getting what they voted for to begin with.”
“On top of that, whether he’s mocking their religion intentionally or not, he still is,” Erickson, who has praised and pummeled the president, told Politico. “I think we are looking not really at a MAGA crack-up per se, but a lot of the base becoming exasperated enough to start looking beyond Trump.”
Protestants formed the majority of Trump voters in 2024, according to the Pew Research Center. Catholics made up about 22 percent.
The president, himself a Christian, has sparked concerns after his erratic antics on social media.
Trump has made Truth Social posts depicting himself as a pope and sarcastically praising Allah on Easter Sunday. But no post has stoked as much outrage as one AI-generated image portraying him as Jesus Christ healing a sick man, which was taken down after widespread backlash.
After Trump claimed he had mistakenly thought the image depicted him as a doctor, Erickson penned a lengthy Substack urging the president’s aides to rein him in.
“These people who keep excusing this stuff keep creating the permission structure for him to do it again and again and beclown themselves in the process because they are too scared to stand up lest they lose some Twitter followers,” he said. “And the permission structure they create leads to the president’s eternal doom and doom for the agenda they and many of us believe in.”
“The Republican Party’s refusal to intervene with the president, smack his hand, and tell him to cut out the antics is why doom is approaching in the midterms,” he warned.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
“I’m happy to support the president and praise him as appropriate. But I will not pretend the bad things are good,” Erickson wrote on Monday. “I am sure the grifter class sleeps quite well at night on their pile of cash, beclowning themselves daily to excuse the bad things or insist they are good. That’s not me or my style.”
