Unless bad leaders are stopped or at least slowed, they will inevitably, inexorably get worse.
Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers.
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Yesterday President Donald Trump directed federal agencies to revoke the security clearances and review the activities of two high-level former government officials, Christopher Krebs and Miles Taylor. Both served in Trump’s first administration – and both had the temerity implicitly or explicitly to criticize him. Trump went so far as to charge Taylor with “conduct [that]could properly be described as treasonous.” Treason, it should be noted, is, in the United States, a crime punishable by death.
Of everything that Donald Trump has done so far in his second term, this is, arguably, the most pernicious, and the most ominous. Liz Cheney, former Republican Representative from Wyoming, did not go too far when she called Trump’s move “Stalinesque.”*
To what specifically did she refer? To Stalin’s lust for power. To Stalin’s securing his total domination in the Soviet Union and the Communist Party by persecuting and prosecuting those who opposed him. Because Stalin was not stopped or even slowed, famously, infamously, he launched the Great Purge, or Great Terror – it lasted from 1936 to 1938 – during which some 700,000 to 1.2 million Soviets died.
Is the United States the Soviet Union? No. Is Trump Stalin? No. But the overarching, all-important point is the same. Which is that in Trump’s case as in all cases of bad leadership the progression from bad to worse is as inexorable as unmistakable – unless it is somehow, by someone or something, stopped or at least slowed.
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The process of going from bad to worse tends to be steady, not sudden or hasty. But once bad has burrowed in, it digs deep and then deeper…. [By then] bad leaders and their followers are so entrenched that they control the system itself, which is why, at this point, the only way to totally get rid of bad is to totally get rid of everyone involved.
Barbara Kellerman, Leadership from Bad to Worse: What Happens When Bad Festers.