Jephthah is described by the biblical Book of Judges as a somewhat disreputable character. Certainly, his birth was disreputable, but it was hardly his fault that his father’s liaison with a prostitute produced him as its fruit. Neither was it his fault that his legitimate half-brothers hated him nor that they had him disinherited and drove him out.

But when he left, the choice of company was his and it was not so good, as might have been feared from such a start in life. He became the leader of a band of men of low character — to use the precise scientific term — nogoodniks. Though Scripture doesn’t specify exactly what he and they did for a living, it is only because it has given us enough information already to make an accurate guess. It tells us simply that Jephthah and his new friends went out together, and that whatever they did made him seem a good candidate to appoint as a war leader when Israel was attacked by the Ammonites. (READ MORE: The Insanity of Biden’s Opposition to Israel’s Judicial Reform)

Jephthah had developed his warring skills with his outlaw band well enough, and so when summoned by the people to defeat the Ammonites, he did a good job. But his story ended in an avoidable tragedy, when an impetuous vow that he took led him to sacrifice his own daughter. Whatever good he did is overshadowed by this bizarre and shocking event. The rabbis of old compared him to a scrub tree that is of not much use for either wood or shade — not a mighty cedar like the true greats.

And yet, he saved the people from the Ammonites. In contemplating this, the Talmud teaches that “Jephthah in his generation was like the prophet Samuel in his generation.” Even though Samuel was so great that Psalm 99 mentions him in the same breath as Aaron and Moses, nonetheless, Jephthah in his time rose to the need of the hour and saved the people from enemy attack and is compared for that to Samuel. Yes, Jephthah had grave character flaws, but because he was the man the hour needed, the Psalmist compared him to the greatest of the greats.

Savior Generals

As a military historian, Victor Davis Hanson has written about the astonishing war leaders who were called upon when disaster seemed inevitable yet who turned things completely around. He dubbed these men savior generals. Here, he writes about what characterizes this kind of leader:

Savior generals were often suspect outsiders before their appointments. Even after their successes, most did not necessarily enjoy the acclaim and tranquility that the record of their military brilliance otherwise might have ensured. Heroes like Themistocles, Scipio, or Belisarius — and in the modern age a Pétain or Grant — died either in poverty, obscurity, or near disgrace. Mavericks of real genius like a George Patton and Curtis LeMay ended up as caricatures of their once brilliant selves.

Hanson describes many of these men as atavistic, opting out of what Hanson calls our modern therapeutic culture. They are throw-backs to more savage times, whose instincts are now lacking in everyone else and so are the only ones who have the aggressive instinct that victory in war requires. They grasp innately the need, as Churchill specified, “to contrive and compel victory.” (RELATED: In Victory, Magnanity)

We have not been kind to them after their victories, often because what makes them superb in battle makes the atrocious outside it. William Sherman knew that well, and therefore categorically refused to run for president when he could easily have been elected. George Patton was a ghastly misfit in the job given after victory of overseeing the Displaced Persons camps in Europe where the survivors of the Holocaust were confined behind barbed wire under military guard and were called by Patton himself “less than human.”

Yet without either of their military brilliance, slavery and Nazism would not have fallen as early as they did.

Jephthah was a judge of Israel, and a judge’s role in biblical Israel didn’t separate between the military and the political. 

We can see his paradigm in Donald Trump. His is not a therapeutic personality. His manners are abominable. His egotism is grating. His slashing attacks at everything that stands in the way of winning are atavistic and aggressive to the extreme.

Hanson wrote: “The need to reject past conventional thinking, of course, is critical for savior generals.” They were suspect outsiders. So, too, did Trump appear in 2016. And like the generals, he conjured a victory when almost everyone predicted defeat.

The question today is if his hour is past and only his flaws remain. His political battles have led to many defeats and very few victories since 2018. Trump derided his opponents as losers and painted himself as a winner, but he has done precious little winning since then. He seems already like the fish out of water that Jephthah and the savior generals became after the emergency that called on their skills has passed. (READ MORE: An Inconvenient Trump: Republicans Are Living an Enormous Lie)

Battle Moves to the Courts

Perhaps his battle is not in the presidential campaign, but in leading the battle in the courts. He is taking the full brunt of an unprecedented seven-year campaign to win political power through criminalizing the opposition. Here in the courts, where Trump faces imprisonment for the length of many lifetimes for the very kind of acts that prominent Democrats have been lauded for, the battle must be fought in which he must take the lead. It is the same fight against the perversion of the government, against the subversion of the FBI, national intelligence agencies, and the Department of Justice, that he has been fighting. The nation needs him to win this.

The mishandling of everything after January 6 is enough for reasonable people to not vote for Trump. He can’t win over these people, of whom there are very many, in this election or perhaps any. 

But the country must see that the greatest threat to the country by far is that of the triumph of those who have used the trust of the American people in their Constitution to gut and pervert American government and exert a power over our public discourse using the methods of fascism — no hyperbole — the ganging up of powerful government with powerful private combinations to end all political opposition to the state.

We need Trump to win the battle in the courts, to drive home that his fight is everyone’s fight. It is the fight against turning the agencies of American government into operatives in a political fight, silencing free speech and the free press through covert collusion with private businesses, and criminalizing political opposition. It is the fight against establishing a double-standard law which exempts political allies from any punishment or censure while savagely pursuing the harshest criminal penalties against political opponents for the same acts.

There is a hell of a fight looming there. The messaging of those who are destroying our democratic institutions very much want to make the legal battle and the political battle the same. That in itself should at the least suggest that we might need to take the opposite approach.

The excesses of Trump after November 2020 have cemented a gut-level dislike of him in about half of the voters of this country, among whom he probably has no chance at all. Although his loyalists have stayed strong, there is no reason to think they can carry the day any more than he has for his allies in elections since then. His poor success record fails his self-set standard of being a winner. His crying of election foul is contaminated by his having cried the same foul against Ted Cruz of all people when Cruz won the 2016 Iowa caucus. He has failed to push upward his polling numbers with the general public since his election. (READ MORE: Trump’s Reelection Woes Are Just Beginning)

He no longer seems the man of the hour, capable of seizing a victory no one else could see. In a year in which Biden should be dead man walking, his nomination seems more likely to seize defeat from the jaws of victory for the Republicans.

But the legal battle is another question entirely. The Dems response to the Keystone Kop, clown-car Capitol trespass has been to turn it into a modern recapitulation of the Bloody Assizes. They are deadly serious and pursue their coup with all the skill and practiced duplicity that Beltway insiders can muster. While they are no good at governing our country, they are very skilled at accumulating power and holding on to it. It is a long and deadly fight we are in.

We need a savior general to fight and win this battle. Trump needs to be free of those things that he can’t do to concentrate on the essential battle he is actually capable of winning, and which could very well determine whether we will have a new birth of freedom and our democracy not perish — or not. 

In that battle, he deserves unflinching support. That is where his finest hour may still come, and where we can still treat his leadership like that of Jephthah at the moment he was needed — equal to the greatest of leaders.