So the lame fall back is it was a really tough hand Trump was dealt.
Every step of the way, every month of this year, Trump fucked up, was stuck in 1st gear and got little or nothing done. Astounding how long it took to get reliable tests to anywhere in the US. Astounding that there's still a shortage of such fucking simple things as masks, and cotton swabs. Amazing how insanely long it took to stop lying to the public and start advocating mask wearing. CDC was useless and actually harmful. Health Secretary and Surgeon General and Redfield at CDC were useless.
Trump downplayed the virus and treated it as a political issue, then bizarrely started turning the daily Health briefings into campaigning.
It's been incompetence down the line.
The thing that kills me is this virus is relatively easy to thwart. Masks, limiting gatherings, social distancing, hand washing. Transmission chains are broken.
If we did this at the outset, such as mid-Feb or March 1 at the latest, there would have been a fraction of infections and deaths. And the economy could have been largely shut down for 2 months and then gradually reopened without much problem.
Time was ALWAYS clearly of the essence. You need to get ahead of the virus, not wait until outbreaks occur all over. Trump really failed at the innumerable DELAYS and Half-Measures. But also the mistakes, largely centered around testing, but also supplies were inexcusable as well.
The complete lack of a National Coordinated Response doomed the US and likely 100K Americans (not to mention the 1M who were needlessly infected and suffered).