Donald Trump: Another False Messiah?

Zevi was a manic-depressive who, in his manic phases, did madly transgressive things. But according to Nathan, Zevi’s crazy criminal behavior was exactly what you’d expect from a Messiah! The whole point of being a Messiah, Nathan said, was to abolish the Law. (Sounds like something Giuliani might say in defense of Trump.)

Jews, who were probably sick of punctiliously obeying every last petty aspect of Jewish law, ate it up. A world with no more law, in which Jews would rule over the Gentile cattle the way God intended, sounded damned good to them.

Trump’s unique brand of craziness likewise played on the fantasies of his audience. Like Zevi, Trump broke rules and got away with it. Many working class Americans fantasize about living lives of egotistic opulence while flouting the rules. Through Trump—or, rather, their image of Trump—they could vicariously live out their fantasies. And like Zevi, who, rumor had it, married a prostitute and invited acquaintances to enjoy her, Trump is said to have married a “model” trafficked from Eastern Europe and to have led a dissolute life in many other respects, as Roy Cohn and “Katie Johnson” could attest.

Another fatal attraction: Both Zevi and Trump were satanic egotists, narcissists who demanded that people worship them instead of God. Zevi changed liturgies so Jews would stop worshipping Yahweh and start worshipping Zevi. He was a self-styled Antichrist who consciously stole the “man as God” motif from the Christians and applied it to himself. Trump, too, invited worship of himself, and was always the foremost and most enthusiastic member of the congregation.

Finally, one can’t help but notice that Zevi and Trump were both “crazy Zionists.” By that I mean that unlike “sane Zionists” (pardon the oxymoron) Zevi and Trump had complete faith in their own ability to madly defy common sense, geopolitical and historical reality, and the existence and independent volition of the people of the Muslim East, and unilaterally willthe supreme success of Greater Israel.

Zevi’s message to the Jews—”come to the Holy Land, I am now King of the World and the Ottoman Sultan is about to surrender to me so we Jews can subjugate and enslave the goyim cattle and retire in splendor and let them do all the work”—quickly collided with reality, in the form of the Sultan himself. Zevi was brought before the Sultan, who said: “If you are the Messiah, my executioners’ arrows won’t hurt you. If you aren’t, you’re an imposter who deserves death.” Zevi’s quick-witted response was a nominal conversion to Islam. The Sultan, who found Zevi mad but charming, treated the new “convert” with proverbial Muslim mercy and compassion, revoking the death sentence and appointing him to a high position with a good salary.

Zevi’s followers, like Trump’s today, were crestfallen. Like followers of Q Anon, Zevi’s cultists (the majority of Jews of 1666) had been dreaming up all kinds of unlikely scenarios purporting to explain why the “messiah” who was going to put everything right couldn’t seem to do so. “In spite of Sabbatai’s apostasy, many of his adherents still clung tenaciously to their belief in him, claiming that his conversion was a part of the Messianic scheme.” (Wikipedia). Likewise, there are still Q followers out there who believe Trump still is going to pull some kind of miracle out of his rear end, magically beam himself back into the White House, arrest the satanic pedophile elite, execute Biden and Hillary, and help America live happily ever after.

50 years after Zevi died in 1676, his self-proclaimed reincarnation, Jacob Frank, rebuilt his satanic Zionist cult and elaborated on Zevi’s doctrine of “redemption through sin.” Will a madman who thinks he is the reincarnation of Donald Trump similarly revive Q Anon during the final years of this century? Stranger things—as the story of Zevi and Frank and the creation of modern Israel shows—have happened.