A widely followed Orthodox lecturer has told his students that President Trump survived last year’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, for a specific divine purpose, that his mission is to dismantle the Iranian regime, and that he risks losing Heaven’s backing the way King Saul lost his kingship if he continues to delay.
The remarks came from Rabbi Mendel Kessin, in the latest installment of an ongoing series examining what he calls the hanhagot, the patterns by which Hashem governs history. Kessin paused a lengthy theological discussion to address what he called “one thing” his audience would want to hear about current events, and used the moment to deliver one of his sharpest public statements yet on the American president.
“He’s Delaying, and He’s Making a Tremendous Mistake”
Kessin was blunt about what he sees as Trump’s failure so far to act decisively against Iran. “He’s dillydallying,” Kessin said. “He’s not doing it, making a tremendous mistake, because he doesn’t understand. People look at him like there’s something wrong with him, like he’s a fool. Because everybody knows what Iran is. They’ve been fooling people for 47 years. Everybody knows you can’t trust them. They will never repent. They couldn’t care less about human life.”
Kessin argued that Iran’s regime and its proxy forces, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and Hamas, kill people “every day,” and that hesitation carries a moral cost of its own. “So why are you letting them live? They should have died a long time ago,” he said, dismissing the prospect of a negotiated settlement over Iran’s nuclear program outright. “You think that they’re going to give you their uranium? Of course not. Because without the uranium, they’re nobody.” He compared the idea of negotiating with Tehran to negotiating with Hitler. “You don’t negotiate with Hitler, do you? Are you gonna trust Hitler?”
His conclusion was direct: “Hashem wants him to take out Iran. And when I say wants him to take out Iran, to end them, to destroy the IRGC, and to take away this evil.”
An “Open Miracle” With a Purpose
Kessin’s argument rests on his reading of the July 2024 assassination attempt against Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a bullet grazed the president’s ear. “I personally believe that Trump was saved from the bullet in Pennsylvania to take out Yishmael in the form of Iran,” Kessin told his audience, “because that’s the last real active agent against the Jewish people, and I believe Hashem wants them gone, and he basically saved Trump to do the job, and gave him the power.”
Kessin described the survival itself as no ordinary near-miss, but what Jewish tradition calls a nes niglah, an open, undisguised miracle, a characterization he noted Trump himself has used. But Kessin argued Trump has drawn the wrong conclusion from his own survival. “So what does he think? Why does he think God saved him to make America rich? It’s nonsense,” Kessin said. “God is not concerned with America. He’s concerned with the entire planet.”
Kessin went further, describing Trump in terms well beyond his formal office. “Trump, like I once said, is not the president of the United States,” he said. “He’s the emperor of Western civilization, because everybody regards him as the strongest and greatest voice in the world.” He attributed that standing, along with Republican control of both chambers of Congress and the state of the American economy, directly to divine backing. “Everybody cowers in a certain sense in front of Trump because Hashem gave him the power and the recognition, almost, not of a messiah, obviously not, but he gave him the power and the recognition of a supreme leader.”
The Warning: King Saul and Agag
The theological weight of Kessin’s warning comes from a biblical precedent he detailed: the story of King Saul’s failure to fully carry out Hashem’s command against Amalek. The Prophet Samuel had relayed an explicit divine instruction to destroy Amalek entirely, including its king. “But Saul and the people spared Agag, and the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good, and would not utterly destroy them” (I Samuel 15:9).
Kessin used that episode as the template for his warning to Trump. “Shaul Hamelech, King Saul, he made a terrible mistake,” Kessin said. “There are several mistakes that Saul made. The worst one was that he failed to kill Agag, king of Amalek. Shmuel Hanavi told him: God wants you to wipe them out. This is a command of God given to him by a prophet, Samuel the prophet. Did he kill Agag? No. He killed the Amalekites, but he didn’t kill the king, and the king lived for one day, and he had a woman with him, and they had a child, and from that came Haman,” a reference to the villain of the Purim story, whom rabbinic tradition traces to Agag’s surviving line.
The consequence, in Kessin’s telling, was total. “If it wouldn’t have been for that, Saul would have been king and would have had descendants who were kings,” he said, describing Saul as a figure carrying the potential role of Mashiach ben Yosef from the tribe of Binyamin. “But because Saul Hamelech, who was a genuine tzaddik (righteous man), failed to do what he should have done, which is a command of God, then God deposed him from his position.” His warning to the sitting American president followed immediately from that account: “You have to be careful when you’re in that kind of position. You have to be very careful in terms of what you do.”
Part of a Larger Framework
The Trump commentary was a detour, by Kessin’s own framing, within a much longer shiur devoted to explaining what he describes as the recurring patterns of divine governance across Jewish history, patterns he says also explain why Hashem permitted the rise of Christianity and Islam as instruments to bring the nations of the world toward monotheism and moral accountability after the Jewish people, in his account, failed to serve as the intended model following the destruction of the Second Temple.
Kessin has taught for decades on Torah hashkafa, Jewish philosophy and the underlying purpose behind historical events, and used the same session to announce the publication, through Feldheim, of a new book on the laws of lashon hara titled “The True Power of Speech: The Key to Both Worlds.”
Kessin’s remarks on Trump and Iran were not framed as prediction but as warning, delivered, in his words, out of concern rather than certainty about what comes next. “We don’t know what God is going to do,” he said. “But God wants him to take out Iran.”
