Donald Trump fields a question in the White House. Photo by Getty Images

Robert Zaretsky April 12, 2025

The emotional and cerebral whiplash that many of us are experiencing during the current Trump administration may seem like a new phenomenon. Yet this experience often bursts out in times of radical change and dashed expectations. One fascinating event not only captures our present moment with stunning precision, but also offers a possible response to it — namely, the career of Sabbatai Zevi, the failed messiah who galvanized Jewish communities across the eastern Mediterranean in the early 17th century.

A young Jewish student from the eastern Mediterranean, Zevi was electrified by a mystical experience — many scholars suggest he struggled with bipolar disorder — that vested him with the belief he was the messiah. Inevitably, the news of Zevi’s transformation, trumpeted by ardent adherents like Nathan of Gaza, attracted legions of fervent believers desperate for hope that this life or the next one would be redeemed. As Gershom Scholem argues in his landmark biography of Zevi, “great masses of people were able to believe in perfect simplicity that a new era of history was being ushered in.”

Until, that is, this belief turned out to be bunk. The Ottoman authorities, worried over the widening surge of Sabbatianism, arrested Zevi in 1666. Given a choice between execution and conversion, Zevi, donning a turban, chose the latter. While the apostasy was a shattering event for most followers, who realized they had been sold a bill of goods, it was electrifying for a smaller number who believed they were sold a ticket to life ever-after. To put it in theological terms, the whiplash was not a bug, but instead a feature of this millenarian worldview.

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It’s better, though, to put it in Scholem’s terms — he argues that the apostasy was not the end, but instead the beginning of the Sabbatean movement. Just as the paradox of a crucified messiah supercharged early Christianity, Scholem suggests, the paradox of a converted messiah — admittedly not quite as, well, dramatic — souped up Sabbatianism.

Cengiz Sisman, a colleague at the University of Houston and leading scholar of Sabbatianism, told me that Zevi’s conversion to Islam “became, paradoxically, part of the bigger divine economy and plan. For true believers, it opened a new, esoteric layer of meaning and led them to embrace antinomianism wholeheartedly.” Refusing to waste this existential crisis, the true believers, led by Nathan of Gaza, instead welded it to their inner and irrational convictions.

Crucially, Scholem underscores the vital difference between the Christian and Sabbatean paradoxes. While the former encourages core virtues like mercy and charity, the latter emboldens vices like antinomianism, the belief that when laws collide with inner truths, laws must be disobeyed. It does not, I think, take a great leap of imagination to see how this belief bleeds into our secular age.

This brings us to Donald Trump. Many of us have been shocked but not surprised by the many whiplashes that our president has inflicted on the world. There are at least three sources for this behavior. First, Trump has always had just one idea — tariffs — which is the wrong idea. Second, Trump has always had just one passion — the will to dominate and humiliate — that cannot be sated.

Finally, ever since the fortunately failed assassination attempt, Trump seems to believe that his mission to make America great is divinely sanctioned. This horrifies the worldly inhabitants among us, but not so much other-worldly types. Take the millions of evangelical Christians convinced that Trump is engaged in a Manichaean battle against the forces of darkness.

Yet, there are other Trump followers who are not evangelical, but no less fanatical in their belief that the president has a plan. Not to be saved from a future climaxing in an apocalyptic Armageddon, but to restore the past, or at least their past, and a once-great America. For reasons — some well-grounded, others sheer fantasy — that explain their discontent, these followers also see Trump as a messianic figure. He is the only man — a man it must be — who can fix it, it being the financial, educational, and professional crises they face, and that “Washington” ignores.

The world according to Fox is the world that evangelical and ideological believers tend to inhabit, their minds less informed than formed by the talking heads who fill the screen.  A striking instance of this phenomenon occurred on Wednesday, when the same catastrophic and permanent tariff scheme that Trump had inflicted on the world a week earlier was atomized by a Truth Social tweet.

To explain this latest whiplash, Trump’s collection of Nathans leapt into the breach. As one Fox luminary, Laura Ingraham, declared: “Trump announced a brilliant move to pause the higher tariffs on countries negotiating with us, but meanwhile to raise China’s tariffs to 125%, to wall off China by boxing them out, further weakening their economic power. It’s genius.”

It appears that we now confront, in every sense of the word, a bastardized form of Sabbatianism, led by a man who, like Zevi, appears to a growing number of Americans as less a genius than he does a maniac. (As Scholem notes, some of Zevi’s followers described him — approvingly — as mad.) The optimists have concluded that Trump’s pausing of the tariffs was, like Zevi’s conversion, a welcome apostasy to reality. But the pessimists worry, perhaps rightly, that our messiah’s madness, given his blessed state of immunity, is not so easily suppressed.

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