Trump the Messiah sees Judas everywhere

You may recall one Sunday night in April, when his holiness Donald Trump had posted a picture of himself in a white robe and red sash, one hand on the forehead of a sick man, light spilling from the other. “Jesus Christ,” many likely muttered to themselves.

Trump had just attacked Pope Leo in their rolling schism. The image was gone by Monday morning, however, deleted after conservative Christians called it blasphemy.

Marjorie Taylor Greene—by then, a former GOP congresswoman, cast out of the MAGA movement she helped build—called it “an Antichrist spirit.” It was read as vanity, largely because it was vanity, delivered with puckish humor.

But it was also revealing about how Trump views his relationship with his missionaries, sent out to share the truth; his truth, at any rate. Because a messiah doesn’t have opponents, he has apostles—and traitors.

Today, a new traitor, a new Judas Iscariot, is readying himself to betray the Messiah: Kevin Warsh, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors.

Disagreement cannot be conscience, or statute, or a bad inflation print. It can only be treachery, committed by someone Trump raised up to their position.

This is more than a labored metaphor. It is the mechanism by which Trump sorts every institution he has staffed. Yesterday, it was pointing at the Judases of the Supreme Court. Today, it points at the Fed.

At 2 p.m. Wednesday, the Fed is expected to raise its benchmark rate by a quarter point, to a range of 3.75 percent to 4 percent, the first increase since July 2023. Futures markets put the odds above 90 percent.

Warsh has held the job for barely four months, and he secured it because Trump handed it to him after years of viciously flaying his predecessor, Jerome “Too Late” Powell, for refusing to cut rates faster.

As Trump sees it, higher rates are needlessly holding back the American economy. But the Fed’s dual mandate, made law by Congress, is to target maximum employment and stable prices—not deliver the whims and wishes of presidents.

Trump has already spent weeks trying to head off this betrayal.

He has demanded the Fed board “BE PATRIOTS for a change,” threatened to halt trade with surplus countries unless rates fall, and sent his vice president, Treasury secretary and senior economic counselor to make the same case in public.

Trump has so far stopped short of naming Warsh as the problem here. That restraint is unlikely to survive the dreaded rate hike. A new moniker for Warsh is surely coming. Kamikaze Kevin? Too Weak Warsh? We can only guess.

Any restraint certainly did not survive with the Supreme Court. On Tuesday, a day after the justices declined to let his mail-in voting restrictions take effect before the midterms, Trump sharply denounced the bench he had substantially built.

His appointees, he wrote, are “not the people I interviewed.” He praised Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the only dissenters, as legends, and dismissed the rest as “a shell of their original selves,” hollowed out by liberal pressure.

“It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history,” Trump wrote.

To the charge sheet, he added the rejections of his global tariffs in February and his birthright citizenship order in June. Betrayal heaped upon betrayal by those he had entrusted to speak the Trump gospel in the temples of American power.

Trump’s Judases come from the pool of apostles he hand-picked because disagreement, or perhaps defiance is a better word, is a personal betrayal. This is a man who lives life by the laws of the transaction. And it sets a trap for Warsh.

Because Trump claimed him publicly as a sympathetic pick, Warsh’s credibility now depends on visibly not doing what Trump wants. Compliance reads as capture. Defiance is the only available proof of independence.

The louder a president demands loyalty, the less an appointee’s agreement is worth—and the harder he is pushed toward the act that will be called betrayal. It takes real spine and genuine independence of thought to betray the Messiah.

Of course, presidents may appoint officials who share their judgment and be aggrieved when they don’t. This Supreme Court has also delivered for Trump, not least on presidential immunity in 2024.

And Trump is living in denial: the Fed hike he fears is largely downstream of his own policy. Tariffs and the Iran war pushed energy costs and inflation expectations up. Warsh is reacting to conditions the White House manufactured for him.

Trump is, to be fair to him, like Jesus, a man who can forgive those who sinned against him.

Michael Cohen—the former fixer Trump spent years calling a rat for testifying against him—is back in the fray. Trump joined Cohen on his radio show last month, told him he had been weaponized, and returned four times to a single word: “recanted.”

“I respect the fact that you recanted everything you said,” Trump said. The price of absolution was not remorse. It was testimony that the sin never really occurred.

And that is where the limit of Trumpian forgiveness lives.

Asked whether he would forgive Greene for turning against him, Trump answered flatly: “Forgive for what? No.” She had not recanted.

There is plenty of history. After Trump’s first U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the infamous Russia investigation, Trump shared a social media post calling the decision an “unforced betrayal.” There was no coming back for Sessions.

So, watch how Trump reacts at 2 p.m. if Warsh’s Fed hikes. Trump may grudgingly accept a rate rise as within the Fed’s remit, as he hinted two weeks ago that he might.

Or, he may attack the committee while sparing the chairman he selected, for now at least. But the past suggests Trump will go for Warsh by name, the latest betrayer.

There is always another Judas. Warsh is probably the next, but certainly not the first, or even the last.