History repeats itself -unfortunately not always as a farce but as a new, avoidable tragedy-.
George W. Bush's colossal blunders in Iraq and Katrina ended in embarrassing political ostracism.
But it was Katrina what doomed his Presidency
Donald J. Trump faced in Covid 19 pandemic a manifold-Katrina moment and -like the 43rd president- failed victim to a mix of hubris, incompetent staff, and superficial judgment.
In Trump's case, this is compounded by his own tendency to oversell and cater opportunistically to his Far Right base instead of addressing the problem.
Populist leaders tend -as Churchill put it- to "do the right thing once they exhausted all the alternatives".
Trump's presidency fate is less relevant for our long-view perspective than the pattern of historical repetition it reveals.
The price of forgetting historical experience is too high.
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