For years, WorldNetDaily has likened Donald Trump to a messiah, as well as to biblical figure Cyrus. Bob Unruh found a right-wing rabbi who did both for a July 28 article, which started with some un-journalistic editorializing:
To Americans the 2024 presidential election appears to be a choice between the mostly conservative GOP President Donald Trump and wildly progressive Democrat Vice President Kamala Harris.
A basic pro-life agenda or radical abortion promotions.
National security and strength or open borders and vacillating foreign policy.
An economy to make families comfortable or higher taxes and more wild spending.
But to a Jewish rabbi, it’s a choice between another Cyrus, the ancient king who, although not Jewish, helped that nation rebuild the temple, or the 4th kingdom of Daniel, which describes a power struggle that leads to a national downfall.
It is Israel365 that cites the warning from Rabbi Isser Z. Weisberg,
The report explains in his video, Weisberg says Americans have the option of “the fourth kingdom described by Daniel that comes before total societal collapse” or … “A second Trump term in office would, on the other hand, be a replay of Cyrus, the non-Jewish ‘Messiah’ who will help Israel build the Temple in Jerusalem.”
Weisberg, who lectures on biblical prophecies and Jewish eschatology, cited his own prediction in 2020 that Trump would be in the White House for a second term.
Neither Weisberg nor Unruh seemed to admit that this prediction was a failure, which seemed to discredit the idea of bringing it up again. Then it was time for Weisberg to deify Trump — and to smear Joe Biden and Kamala Harris as representative of the “fourth beast”:
“President Donald Trump was the first American president who stood up in defiance to the entrenched and endemic anti-Israel attitude of all previous U.S. administrations towards our presence in the Holy Land. This attitude has been in place for the past 70 years. Only [Trump], or somebody like him, would be the person who deserves this great honor of representing Western society and fulfilling the prophecy uttered to our matriarch Rebecca, that the elder one will serve the younger one.”
He said of the Joe Biden administration, which succeeded Trump’s first term, “Western society led by the United States had to go through further degradation and humiliation under the lowly and weak Biden administration before goodness could emerge from the ashes of the failed American Dream. Biden’s incredible incompetence and intellectual decay is but a symbol of the total obliteration of the fourth beast envisioned by Daniel some 2500 years ago.”
The Bible’s book of Daniel notes there are four kingdoms to precede the “end times,” and the fourth is described as having legs of iron and feet of iron and clay, interpreted to mean a failing and divided kingdom that will fall.
The rabbi said, “Biden’s replacement with someone whose only qualifications are for gender or skin color and the birthplace of her parents further underscores the complete composition of the fourth beast.”
[…]He noted that history shows only one non-Jew to has been given the title of “messiah,” and that was Cyrus the Great, “who freed the Jews from their exile forced upon them by the Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon.”
Today, he said, “God does not articulate his plans through the mouths of human beings, but he has other ways of communicating. I’m no prophet, and I could be wrong. Still, it seems obvious to me that on Shabbat, July 13, in Butler, Pennsylvania, and in front of the eyes of the entire world, God’s voice was heard loud and clear to anyone whose ears were open, and he chose the second non-Jewish Messiah. Not to redeem the world. That job is reserved for the Jewish Messiah, a direct descendant of King David and his son Solomon. But like Cyrus, the first non-Jewish Messiah who was chosen to assist the Jews and reestablish on the land of Israel after the seventy-year exile in Babylon, [Trump] is the current non-Jewish Messiah who was chosen to be of service to the Jewish people and the Jewish Messiah.”
Unruh couldn’t be bothered to find an actual biblical scholar to examine Weisberg’s claims — just too good (and too embracing of WND’s partisan pro-Trump narrative) to fact-check, apparently.