Now, from Fareed Zakaria and Ezra Klein's discussion of "The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy," I see nothing in particular to connect Trump's foreign policy with print culture in our Western cultural history - or with our contemporary secondary oral culture.
In summary, I would borrow the terms that Fareed Zakaria used to describe Trump, "so mercurial" and "so idiosyncratic," to also describe Trump's foreign policy as idiosyncratic and mercurial.
Trump 2.0 is now repudiating certain American foreign policy values that American foreign policy worked diligently to develop since the end of World War II - as both Fareed Zakaria and Ezra Klein point out in their long NYT discussion of American foreign policy.
But those American foreign policy value are not the only American values now endangered by Trump 2.0. Trump 2.0 is also an existential threat to American values expressed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence and in the U.S. Constitution and By-Laws - American values that emerged in the print culture that emerged in our Western cultural history after the Gutenberg printing press emerged in Europe in the mid-1450s.
Yes, Trump's apocalyptic views tend to resonate in our contemporary secondary oral culture with the memories in our collective unconscious of our human ancestors in primary oral cultures and their understandably fearful orientation in life.
But President Franklin D. Roosevelt correctly warned about allowing fear to get the better of us.
When we allow our unfounded fear to get the better of us, we embrace an apocalyptic view of the world. We have an unwarranted sense that the world is threatening. To be sure, the world does indeed contain existential threats to our personal and our collective well-being. We do indeed need to develop the ability to discern carefully what in the world is not a threat to our well-being and what is a threat to our well-being.
Yes, in my carefully considered judgment, Trump 2.0 is an existential threat to our American way of life.
Now, the NYT headline "The Dark Heart of Trump's Foreign Policy" is an apt characterization of Trump's foreign policy.
In my judgment, it would also be apt to speak of Trump's dark heart.
With all due respect for Joseph Conrad, Trump today is the heart of darkness in the United States today.
The NYT columnist Maureen Dowd nicely captures Trump's heart of darkness today in the title of her column "Trump Is Rootin' for Putin" (dated March 1, 2025) in The New York Times.
For another cogent NYT op-ed about Trump today that is also of related interest, see NYT op-ed columnist David French's column titled "Trump Is Breaking Things We Can't Just Fix" (dated March 2, 2025).
For an insightful psychological analysis of Trump's heart of darkness, see the American psychiatrist Justin A. Frank's 2018 book Trump on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President.
Now, from the early 1990s to today, I have been fascinated with the American psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore's psychological theory about the eight archetypes of maturity and their accompanying sixteen bipolar "shadow" form in the human psyche.
Robert Moore and his co-author Douglas Gillette have set forth an accessible account of the four masculine archetypes of maturity and their eight accompanying "shadow" in the male psyche - they are also in the female psyche - in their accessible 1990 book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover: Rediscovering the Archetypes of the Mature Masculine.
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