The Challenge Donald Trump Hasn’t Accepted Yet

In October 2025, Jake Turx, a Hasidic journalist with a White House press pass, stood up in the briefing room and asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt a question that made the room laugh: “To your knowledge, has the topic of rebuilding the Holy Temple in Jerusalem ever come up?” Turx had set the question up with a straight face, noting that Trump “is likely going to go down as the greatest builder of this era.”

Leavitt shut it down in four words: “No, it has not.”

The room moved on. But the question wasn’t ridiculous. It was a provocation — a deliberate attempt to put something on the table that everyone in that room was too sophisticated to take seriously. And the fact that it got a laugh tells you something important about where we are.

Because here is what nobody in that briefing room knew, or at least nobody said out loud: this has all happened before.

In a recent Bible Month conversation on the Israel365 YouTube channel, Rabbi Elie Mischel and Aharon Mendelowitz explored the opening chapter of the book of Ezra — and what they found has striking implications for our moment. The book begins with a proclamation from the most powerful man in the world. Cyrus, king of Persia, conqueror of Babylonia, master of an empire stretching from India to Greece, issues a decree: God has commanded me to build Him a temple in Jerusalem. Whoever among His people wants to return — let them return.

Cyrus was a pagan king. He worshipped idols. He was, by any measure, not a holy man. And yet the prophet Isaiah had named him — by name, generations before his birth — as God’s mashiach. Not the final Messiah, but mashiach in its original sense: anointed, appointed by God for a specific mission.

God’s instrument for the return of the Jewish people to their land was a Persian pagan.

There are those today who refer to Donald Trump as a Cyrus figure. As Rabbi Mischel and Mendelowitz discuss, it is not hard to see why. The unlikely rise, the unapologetic support for Israel, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, the embassy move — and then the assassination attempt, the bullet that took a piece of his ear, which Trump himself has spoken about as a sign that God preserved him for a reason. God works through unlikely vessels. He always has.

But the Cyrus parallel, as compelling as it is, may actually be setting the bar too low.

Turn back a few books in the Bible, to 1 Kings 5, and you find a different model of what Gentile partnership in God’s purposes can look like. Solomon is preparing to build the First Temple in Jerusalem. He has the vision, the resources, the divine mandate. What he needs is lumber — the great cedars of Lebanon — and the craftsmen who know how to work them. And so he turns to Hiram, king of Tyre.

Hiram doesn’t issue a proclamation. He doesn’t give permission. The Jews don’t need his permission — they are sovereign in their own land, building their own Temple. What Hiram does is show up. He sends cedar and cypress timber. He sends his own craftsmen to work alongside Solomon’s. He enters into a full partnership with the king of Israel to build the house of God. “Hiram gave Solomon all the timber of cedar and cypress that he desired,” the text tells us, “and Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat” (1 Kings 5:24-25).

This, Rabbi Mischel and Mendelowitz suggest, is what full Gentile partnership in the story of Israel’s redemption actually looks like. Not a permission slip. A partnership.

Trump has been a Cyrus. He has used the power at his disposal to open doors for the Jewish people and the State of Israel, and that is not nothing — it is, in fact, extraordinary. But Cyrus and Hiram are two different models, and the question worth asking is whether Trump sees himself as one or both.

Cyrus issued his decree and stepped back. Hiram sent his timber and his craftsmen and got to work.

Jake Turx got a laugh in the White House briefing room. But the question he was really asking — even if he was asking it with a smile — is one of the most serious questions of our time. The State of Israel is rebuilding. The Jewish people are coming home. The prophecies that seemed impossible for two thousand years are unfolding in real time. In that story, there is a role for a Cyrus and a role for a Hiram.

Donald Trump has already played one of them magnificently.

The question is whether he is willing to play the other.

This article was inspired by a conversation between Rabbi Elie Mischel and Aharon Mendelowitz on the Israel365 Bible Month YouTube series. To watch the full discussion, check out the Israel365 YouTube channel.