For most of 2005, I was in Baghdad, Iraq serving as a part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As a medic, from time to time (once every month or six weeks) I was called upon to participate in patrols outside of our bases’s perimeter. One day while patrolling, we had dismounted from our vehicles and were walking through a neighborhood. At one point, we stopped to take some rest. There was a group of young Iraqi boys playing soccer, in a vacant lot across the street. The soccer ball was kicked into our midst. A little kid about ten or twelve years old, yelled over at us to get our permission to retrieve the ball. We said yes, and then when he got the ball, I asked him if the people in his neighborhood liked the Americans. He said “Noâ€. I asked, “Why not?†He said, "Because you're all Jews" in a very matter-of-fact way, and ran off. All this child knew about America and the people who live there was what he learned from Saddam Hussein’s propaganda, and the anti-American, anti-Semitic culture in which he was raised. In a way, the boy lived in a type of bubble, from which he derived a distorted view of America and Americans.
Likewise, Mr. Hassan seems to live in something of a bubble himself, and this leads him to have a distorted view of Trump and his supporters in his book ​The Cult of Trump ​ . The first problematic distortion is that he keeps repeating how POTUS is "anti-immigrant" and "anti-immigration," and that this is motivated (pages 14-15, 39, 210) by xenophobia and racism. Trump denies that he is a racist or a xenophobe. Hassan also implies (pages 165-168, 210) that all those who agree with POTUS are themselves racists and xenophobes. This is an informal logical fallacy known as the straw-man argument (a spurious, easily defeated argument), because POTUS says he is not anti-immigration, he's anti-ILLEGAL immigration, as are many of his supporters. There is a big difference.
The next problematic distortion is that Mr. Hassan states (pages 18, and 151) that conservative, evangelical Christians believe that God hand-picked Donald Trump to be POTUS. It would be more accurate to state that conservative, evangelical Christians believe (on the basis of primarily Romans 13, but also other New Testament Bible verses) that no matter who is POTUS, this person is POTUS because God put them there, along with all the other leaders. So, Hassan is making a faulty generalization. To evangelical Christians, even Barack Obama was POTUS because God wanted him to be POTUS. This is misleading on the surface, because it does not take into consideration what mainstream Christian teaching down through the ages has taught for 2000 years. So, Hassan is mistaken about the "evangelical Christians believe that God hand-picked Donald Trump to be POTUS" part of his argument.
Hassan continues about President Trump by (basically) saying that most Trump supporters don't REALLY like Donald Trump, they just THINK they like Donald Trump because Trump has used “thought reform techniques†on them. Anybody who is not hypnotized into believing that they like Trump was a bad person (a racist, an anti-Semite, etc.) to begin with, or else was psychologically or intellectually impaired. Hassan seems to see it as his role to straighten us all out so that we can attain a state he calls "freedom of mind" (pages 7, and 216). The problem, though, is that he never really operationalizes what somebody who has attained "freedom of mind" will be like, or how they'll behave. One is left with the impression that Hassan is implying that somebody with true "freedom of mind" will see and interact with the world as he sees and interacts with it. In other words, Hassan seems to be implying that a person with an authentically liberated mind will see the world as he sees the world! He even (on page 231) calls for a new set of commandments to be handed down to humankind, to supplement the Ten Commandments of old! The problem with this idea is, who will write these new commandments, Mr. Hassan and his cohort? Are these new commandments or existing ones? Don’t we have them already, and we call them “laws� ​It's a secular humanist's dream, that we get to make commandments for ourselves without God's guidance, isn't it?​ ​Hassan states, "People consensually abide by rules for the common good. That is also true of our social behavior--the Ten Commandments were established thousands of years ago as a mechanism for helping people get along in groups. They were also established as a form of social control, with their focus on worshiping ‘the one true God’. What we may need now are commandments that guide our ethical behavior as citizens, regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, or sexual or religious preference." Mr. Hassan is making normative statements that are reflective of his relativistic worldview, as opposed to making positive statements that are based on the Old Testament’s morally absolutist point of view. Perhaps Mr. Hassan misunderstands the Biblical worldview that the Old Testament covenant communities operated under. The Ten Commandments are moral absolutes from this perspective; they are not suggestions and are not relative to any socially or culturally dictated modes of morality. Yet, Mr. Hassan seems oblivious to any of this, in prescribing this self-defeating, morally relativistic concept of “new commandments†to his readers. ​
"The Cult of Trump"​ appears to be disconnected from reality, and is evidence that Mr. Hassan lives in a bubble of his own. Just like the Iraqi kid I met in Baghdad, with his distorted view of America and Americans, Mr. Hasssan has his own ideological echo chamber that he inhabits, and that echo chamber has distorted his view of political conservatives. He seems to think that he is doing his sacred duty by writing this book, and warning the world about the bad man he thinks that Donald Trump is. He thinks that in so doing, he is helping to repair the world and oppose evil and injustice. But he is misguided, and comes across as condescending and patronizing. However, the book raises some larger questions that need to be asked by all readers, and that are applicable to all of life. One is regarding objective truth versus sentiment or desire. Another is the need for compelling, reasoned arguments that engage competing claims or worldviews that all persons ought to engage with. A third question is the place of hard evidence versus opinion. How does one discern one from the other? Based on a reading of The Cult of Trump, it is evident that Steve Hassan lives in his own bubble, not portraying actual conservative beliefs and values, but rather a distorted view of politics in America.
