Other stories today point both to the likely inevitability of a coronavirus outbreak and the utter denial and Team tRump’s denial and incompetency. There is a historical background that both explains why tRump’s people are not up to the task and provides possible illumination of the downfall of tRump.
Hannah Arendt explained it long ago in her review of totalitarian behavior in Germany and Russia:
“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
We have seen tRump’s paranoia in action as he has replaced competent people with yes men, ad ifinitum. There is a historical parallel that may explain the eventual downfall of tRump. Stalin’s paranoia almost led the Soviet Union to defeat in WW2. Here is a key graf on how that affected the army, and reflects Arendt’s above statement.
Much of Stalin’s paranoid fixation about the Red Army was focused on its head, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky. As brutal as Stalin in quelling opposition, using poison gas on revolting peasants, and executing reform-seeking sailors, Tukhachevsky was a brilliant advocate of armored warfare. But it was his very emphasis on military professionalism that struck at the principle of party loyalty—which meant, essentially, loyalty to Stalin.
The above-linked discussion mentions the Finnish Fiasco, which refers to Russia not being able to conquer Finland in the early part of WW2. Not included there is the story the Fins tell about how they defeated the Russians, mostly summed up in sausage soup and ricks of wood. Russian soldiers on the frontline were starving by the end of the campaign. Stalin had purged the army of perceived non-loyalists, which rid the army of competent leaders and led to supply lines being broken. To beat the Russians, the Fins just needed to have food, in this case very aromatic sausage soup. The Russians could smell the soup and laid down their arms, for which they no longer had ammunition, in exchange for food. Before the end, the Fins had, due to inept leadership of the new Russian commanders, been able to separate the Russian army into small units (ricks of wood) that could be easily beaten.
So Stalin’s paranoia decimated the army leadership and made it impossible for the vast Russian army to defeat tiny Finland. The glimmer of hope is that tRump’s similar purging of the executive branch (if not Republican leadership in general), which is leading to more and more ineptitude, may help lead to his eventual downfall.
Team tRump is obviously unprepared to take on something as big and important as the coronavirus. One hopes that there will not be an epidemic in the US. But the potential for disaster is sobering to say the least.