Three months before Trump’s re-election, I wrote an article titled Does the Bible prophecy of the end times require Trump’s return as president as the “new Cyrus the Great” in order for the prophecy of the Third Temple in Jerusalem to come true? This was not the first time I suggested that President Trump might build or authorize Israel to build a Jewish Third Temple on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. I wrote on my blog back in January 2017, when Trump took office for his first four-year term: “Donald Trump may indeed be the Cyrus the Great of our time, put in office by God for this very purpose – to build the Third Temple in Jerusalem, so that the 70th week of Daniel 9 could begin and the events of Revelation could be fulfilled before the disappearance of the generation that witnessed ‘miracle of the fig tree’ (Matthew 24:32-34), the rebirth of the State of Israel, between 2018 and 2028 (Psalm 90:10).”

In the same article from January 2017, I correctly predicted that Trump would recognise Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel and move the American embassy to Jerusalem. I also predicted the timing correctly, as I speculated in my article that the period between December 2017 and May 2018 would be prophetically significance for the state of Israel. I did not foresee at that time that Trump would continue as president after 2024, because I did not foresee that the election would be stolen from him and that he would be re-elected for a second term in 2024, but I referred in my article to 2028 – Trump’s last year as the 47th president of the US – because that is when the State of Israel will be 80 years old, which according to Psalm 90 is the maximum length of a generation.

My own career as an eschatologist was launched when, at the age of 13, I read Teijo-Kalevi Lusa’s book Maailmanloppu 2028? (The End of the World in 2028?, a Finnish book published in 2002). The prophetic significance of the year 2028 was discussed in that book, among other things, in the light of Matthew 24:32-34 and Psalm 90:10. The conclusion of the book was that the rebirth of Israel in 1948 – also the year of the birth of King Charles III – was the beginning of the so-called “miracle of the fig tree”, the generation that would not see death until the second coming of Jesus. And since Psalm 90:10 says “Our days shall be seventy years, or at the most eighty years”, this gives the cut-off date as 2018-2028.

The title of Lusa’s book is only slightly misleading, because the Bible does not predict an actual end of the world, but the end of one age and the beginning of another. And in the prophetic calendar of the Bible, the events in Israel are the “clock of time” that tells us how close we are to that turning of the ages. While 2018 was not the end of the world, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel by the world’s leading Gentile nation was itself a very decisive prophetic sign that we are on the threshold of this new era.

It also foreshadowed the nearness of the establishment of the third temple in Jerusalem, which will be the greatest sign of the nearness of Jesus’ second coming, as foretold in many end-time scriptures such as 2 Thessalonians 2:4 and Revelation 11:2. For this reason, I have considered it possible that President Trump’s legacy in Jewish history would not only remain the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel – which it has been for 3,000 years, but the world that appeases the Muslims and “Palestinians” has been unwilling to acknowledge this obvious historical and biblical fact – but also the recognition of the Temple Mount as the holiest place of worship for Jews and the sovereign estate of Israel, which would also mandate the establishment of a third temple.

Such a development has not been possible as long as Washington has been ruled by a president who has promoted a two-state model for the Israel-Palestine conflict. Indeed, this model is based on the idea that half of Jerusalem – including the Temple Mount area – would also be ceded as the capital of a future Palestinian state (according to Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian state should be “judenfrei” – free of Jews). The international community has thus sought to turn back the clock of history and return the Holy City to the pre-1967 world when East Jerusalem and the so-called ‘West Bank’, Judea and Samaria, were under illegal Jordanian occupation.

This doomed peace model was also promoted by Republican presidents like George W. Bush. President Trump also promoted it in his first term even though he recognised Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel. However, the Israel-Hamas war triggered by the October 7th terrorist attacks has prompted President Trump to rethink the Middle East peace process. In May 2024, he said he no longer supported a two-state solution or that the Gaza war had at least made the prospects for peace through a two-state solution significantly more difficult (this should go without saying, as Israel cannot afford to risk the security of its citizens if its neighbours were a terrorist state steeped in Jew-hatred like Hamas-run Gaza).

However, since 2016, Trump has been very determined to find a solution to the Middle East conflict. In his first term in office, he has already brought about the normalisation of relations between Israel, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. During his next administration, he will seek to expand this into a peace between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which could serve as a symbol and encouragement for a wider peace between Jews and Arabs – including Palestinian Arabs. But this would require a deeper cultural and structural change in the institutions that currently foment Jew-hatred in Gaza and the West Bank. My personal view has been that real peace cannot be achieved by appeasing the Islamists and that is why the conflict in the Middle East has not been resolved for 77 years.

Real peace will not come from Israel withdrawing from the territories it has conquered in its defensive war under pressure from Islamists and the international community. It will only encourage aggression and violence – as already seen in the terrorist attacks of October 7th – and thus prolong the conflict. Real peace would come from Israel boldly taking control of Gaza, the West Bank and the Temple Mount, regardless of the whining of the international community. History shows that peace comes when the stronger side defeats the weaker side in war and crushes their fighting spirit. Israel would have done much better during the year-long Gaza war if the Biden administration and the international community had not intervened in the conflict and tied the hands of the Netanyahu regime. A quicker defeat of the enemy would also have meant saving civilian lives as the prolongation of the war also increases the number of civilian casualties.

Sometimes, however, wars have to be resolved through compromise and negotiation, as Trump intends to do with the war in Ukraine. This is the only solution if there is a risk of the conflict reaching an impasse where there is no clear decisive victory in sight for either side and the conflict threatens to drag on and escalate into a world war where millions – or billions – of people would lose their lives. The war in Ukraine would be a very good example of this. But Israel cannot afford to negotiate or compromise with terrorists who have admitted that if given the chance they would repeat the October 7 mass murders over and over again until all Jews in the Middle East had been killed.

Isaiah’s prophecy says that when the third temple stands on the Temple Mount, the heads of the nations will “go forth saying: ‘Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways, and that we may walk in his paths; for out of Zion goes forth the law, and out of Jerusalem the word of the Lord’. And he shall judge among the heathen, and shall execute judgment upon many nations. And they shall forge their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning knives; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.” (Isaiah 2:3-4) It is no coincidence that global peace is associated in this prophecy with the existence of the temple. Jesus called this temple “the house of prayer for all nations” (Mark 11:17), referring to Isaiah 56:7’s prophecy of the coming Messianic age.

While the ultimate peace will be brought by the Prince of Peace himself, Jesus Christ, the Third Temple is also a foretaste of the universal peace that Jesus will bring when he returns. It should now be remembered that the Antichrist himself is the enemy of that temple, because he will desecrate it and place there the abomination of desolation. At the same time he will gather all the nations of the world against Jerusalem, so that “the city will be conquered, the houses will be plundered, the women will be raped, and half the city will go into exile” (Zechariah 14:2). As a result, the Gentiles will trample Jerusalem for 42 months, or three and a half years (Revelation 11:2). So this global chaos and war is not because of the temple itself, but because Satan and the nations he has driven wild are waging war against God’s people and His holy mountain. This will only end when Satan is bound to his thousand-year prison sentence at the end of the 42-month reign of the Antichrist.

In the same way, the bloodshed in the Middle East today is not caused by the existence of Israel, but by the existence of Islamists. Even if the establishment of the temple would eventually lead to violence as a result of the Islamist backlash, it could lead to a temporary peace in the beginning because peace comes from a show of strength and military superiority – not from weakness and retreat. A few social media influencers in the MAGA-movement has been quite anti-Israel and after October 7th some of them began promoting classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and medieval blood libel myths.

Such influencers often put American and Israeli interests against each other, when in fact these interests are mutually beneficial in areas such as counter-terrorism and technological innovation. But Trump himself and his inner circle have been the most pro-Jewish and pro-Israel president in American history from the very beginning, and for this reason he has enjoyed strong support from American conservative Jews and Christian Zionists. This is also reflected in his recent cabinet appointments. All the top names on Trump’s core team – Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Tulsi Gabbard and Marco Rubio – are known as staunch defenders of Israel.

Some of these names may have been critical of each other in the past and their foreign policy stances may have represented different views, but all of them are strongly pro-Zionist. Elon Musk is a friend of Netanyahu and American conservative Jews, and after his visit to Israel he showed a New York Times reporter a pendant around his neck that read “bring them home”. He said he would not take it off until all the hostages kidnapped by Hamas had been returned to their homes. Vivek Ramaswamy has advocated a line where Israel’s military dependence on America would be gradually reduced, but at the same time he doesn’t want to interfere with how Israel fights terrorists and said he would love to see the IDF put “every single Hamas terrorist’s head on a spike.” Former Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr, received a rousing ovation from the controversial Rabbi Shmuley in July 2023 when he presented his historically astute and morally clear-sighted views on Zionism and the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Another ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, whose career I have been following since 2016 and praising on my blog since 2019, is also known as an outspoken critic of Islamist ideology, who attended the November 2023 pro-Israel rally in Washington and criticised the absence of Biden and Harris from the event. Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who has had a reputation among the core MAGA crowd as a more neoconservative war hawk, said in a video of a Palestinian protester who harassed him that he wants Israel to destroy every single Hamas terrorist and called them “brutal animals who committed heinous crimes” not only against Jews but also against civilians in their own country. When Trump chose Rubio as his Secretary of State, I wrote about this on Facebook:

Many Trump supporters are not happy with the choice of Marc Rubio as Secretary of State, because he has more of a reputation as a warmonger neoconservative than, say, ex-Democrat Tulsi Gabbard, who would have been better received by the MAGA crowd. What many Trump supporters fail to understand, however, is that one of the reasons there were no new wars under his previous administration was precisely because he kept war hawks like John Bolton around, who wanted to bring down governments that were hostile to the US.

For example, in an interview with Joe Rogan, Trump called Bolton an “idiot”, but used him as a deterrent that he brought with him whenever he met enemies of the US. After all, Trump’s Secretary of State must not have too soft or too pacifist a reputation if America’s enemies are to take the Trump administration seriously enough this time around. That is why Rubio is much better suited to this post than Gabbard, Kennedy or Ramaswamy, who are known more as isolationists (which they are not) or diplomats than war hawks.

Trump appointed Gabbard as head of the National Intelligence Agency (DNI) – the same agency that had put him on the terror watch list under the Biden administration after his criticism of Kamala Harris. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been nominated to head the US Secretary of Health and Human Services where he plans to end the corruption and conflicts of interest of big drug and food companies “to make America healthy again” (see: Robert F. Kennedy Junior: “President Trump is like my uncle John F. Kennedy.”). Ramaswamy and Musk will in turn lead a new government agency called DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), whose mission is to make government spending more cost-effective by cutting unnecessary government spending.

The revolutionary process is due to be completed by the 250th anniversary of US independence in July 2026 and Musk has pledged to cut annual government spending by up to $2 trillion from the roughly $6 trillion in annual federal spending. However, there are no plans to cut spending on Social Security or the military.

Trump’s supporters, who often criticised his first-term picks for cabinet officials – because many of them turned out to be backstabbers hostile to the MAGA agenda from the same Washington “swamp” he was supposed to drain – have been particularly pleased with the cabinet picks so far. The Pennsylvania Democratic senator John Fetterman – also an admirably outspoken supporter of Israel against his party’s Hamas sympathisers – said Trump’s bold appointments were “kind of like a God-tier kind of trolling just to trigger a meltdown” of his party (some suspect Fetterman himself is a closet conservative trolling the left in the Democrat’s disguise).

In addition to the names mentioned above, Trump has chosen as ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas and a well-known Christian Zionist pastor who has visited Israel several times since the 1970s and who believes that the land of Israel belongs to the Jews according to biblical promises, including the so-called “occupied” territories. Huckabee also believes in the biblical prophecy of the end times and its fulfilment in the land of Israel. Only a Christian Zionist like Huckabee could support or encourage the Trump administration to establish a third temple in Jerusalem.

Many of today’s Christian Zionists also support Israeli Orthodox Jews for the rebuilding of the Temple (see: Correcting misconceptions about the Third Temple of Jerusalem. Why can Christians support and bless the Temple Institute’s efforts to build a third temple?). But the clearest voice in favour of the temple was that of Peter Hegseth, a familiar face on Fox Morning show Fox & Friends, who served in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and as a guard at Guantanamo Bay prison camp and was appointed by Trump to head the Department of Defense. In 2018, Hegseth spoke at the Arutz Sheva conference in Jerusalem and said the following:

Unfortunately, we live in a time when fake news is everywhere. No country has suffered more from fake news than the State of Israel. This is my third trip to Israel. I was here in 2013 and 2016 and now again, and at every turn I learn more about the lies being told about the Jewish people, the history of this country, the founding of Israel, the Israeli government, the treatment of Arabs and Palestinians, the West Bank, Judea and Samaria, Jerusalem, the Old City, which if exposed to the world would change the world’s perception of Israel.

And so I take solemn responsibility to come here and learn the truth on the ground, and then go back to America and fight the fake news about the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab-Israeli peace process, so-called the two-state solution, which is still dripping from the lips of American intellectuals, although if you walk on the ground today you will understand that there is no such thing as a two-state solution.

What I love about this group is the eternal optimism of Jews in faith in the Scriptures of this land and the understanding that for years to come, if not this year in Jerusalem, then next year in Jerusalem. But we are here in Jerusalem, and today Jennifer and I and others had the opportunity to visit the Western Wall of the Temple Mount, the Western Wall tunnels and much of the Old City, and as you stand there you can’t help but look at the miracle in front of you, and it made me think of another miracle, and I hope it’s not too far away, because 1917 was a miracle, 1948 was a miracle, 1967 was a miracle, and in 2017 the declaration of Jerusalem as the capital was a miracle, and there’s no reason why the miracle of rebuilding the Temple Mount Temple shouldn’t be possible.

I don’t know how it would happen, but I know it could happen, that’s all I know. And the step in this process, the step in any process is recognizing that facts and actions on the ground really do matter. And so by visiting Judea and Samaria, understanding that the sovereignty of the land of Israel and the cities of Israel is a crucial next step, we show the world that this is the land of the Jews and the land of Israel.

Conclusion

Coincidentally, next year, as Trump enters his second presidential term, Israel will celebrate its 70th anniversary as the country also turns 77. Although the celebration of the 70th Jubilee may not be one of Israel’s official anniversaries, this anniversary can be counted by referring to Edwin Thiele’s famous chronology, in which he counted the arrival of the Israelites under Moses and Joshua in the land of Canaan in 1406 BC. Counting forward 49 x 70 years (the 50th Jubilee year was also the first year of the new Jubilee cycle), we arrive at 2025 as the 70th Jubilee year (not counting the “zero year”). The Jewish religious year changes in the spring and the 70th Jubilee year would also begin in the spring of 2025, around the same time as the 77th anniversary of the modern State of Israel.

I have many times predicted the future correctly by observing the prophetic significance of the number seven, so I will not hesitate this time either to predict a significant event for the first year of Trump’s administration, especially concerning Jerusalem and the Temple Mount. I do not think it is a coincidence that at the same time Israel is also be governed by the most conservative and religious government in its history, as I reported in my blog in November 2022. Israel will hold new parliamentary elections, perhaps again next year or in October 2026 at the latest. If the current security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, who has been labelled “far-right” in the mainstream press and who supports full Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount and the right of Jews to worship their God on their holiest mountain, were elected prime minister, this would create the political conditions for the establishment of a third temple.

Even if Netanyahu remains in office, the peace agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia could also include new arrangements for the management of the Temple Mount, allowing for the establishment of a temple on or next to the site of the Dome of the Rock Mosque and Al-Aqsa. In any case, such a construction project or the mere dismantling of the Temple Mount “status quo” –whose original terms have already been violated by the Wakf, which currently administers the Temple Mount – would require the support and blessing of Israel’s main ally, the US government. And such a blessing could only come from a friend of Israel and visionary thinker like President Trump, who is not constrained by the old failed policies even if they have the unanimous support of governments around the world and the authoritative “expert opinions” of academics.