Just to clarify one possible misreading of Chiang's point I noticed due to the way I excerpted his statement: he's not suggesting that incompetent officials should not be called out and held accountable.

He's saying rather if you're a fiction writer and you were trying to write a story about a plausible sci-fi pandemic and you added a character like Trump and depicted a scene like that press conference yesterday, you'd literally lose the plot and lose any serious reader. It would unsuspend disbelief.