Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) May 9, 2026: In the present OEN article, I use Walter J. Ong's media ecology account of our Western cultural history to discuss both America historically and today, and Iran today as a residually oral culture, and I use Robert Moore's discussion of grandiosity in his 2003 book Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity, edited by Max J. Havlick (Chiron Publications) to discuss President Trump's grandiosity in bombing Iran.
No doubt Robert Moore's imagery of a dragon is intended to suggest how powerful grandiosity is.
Now, over the years, I have written 220 or so OEN articles in which I have discussed the work of the American Jesuit scholar Walter J. Ong (1912-2003; Ph.D. in English, Harvard University, 1955) of Saint Louis University.
Over the years, I have also written about the work of the Jungian psychotherapist and psychological theorist Robert Moore (1942-2016; Ph.D. in psychology and religion, University of Chicago, 1975) of the Chicago Theological Seminary in many OEN articles.
In my judgment, President Trump did not have a good reason to bomb Iran, but he bombed Iran.
After President Trump started the war with Iran, he then started attacking Pope Leo XIV verbally.
Now, many conservative American Catholics, like many other American conservatives, voted for Trump in the presidential elections in 2016, 2020, and 2024.
But President Trump's verbal attacks on Pope Leo have not been welcomed by his conservative American Catholic followers.
See Brian Roewe's article "Poll shows most Americans unhappy with Trump's Jesus image, criticism of Pope Leo" in the lay-run National Catholic Reporter (dated May 7, 2026):
After President Trump posted an image of himself as the second coming - an image that many of his conservative American Christian followers found blasphemous, he then followed up by trying to suppress that blasphemous image of himself.
Trump's Jesus image of himself is an example of his grandiosity.
I find it a relief that conservative American Catholics today support Pope Leo XIV, because I remember how vociferous certain conservative American Catholics were in objecting to the doctrinally conservative Pope Francis. They were so vociferous that the Italian philosopher Massimo Borghesis wrote the book titled Catholic Discordance: Neoconservatism vs. the Field Hospital Church of Pope Francis, translated by Barry Hudock (Liturgical Press Academic, 2021; original Italian edition, 2021).
Now, for several decades before the 2016 presidential election, American conservatives felt under siege by American culture - because they generally rejected both the black civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s and subsequent decades and the women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequent decades. In the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump invoked the term political correctness as a rallying point for his conservative followers - and in the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Rodham Clinton symbolized the spirit of political correctness.
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