[makomk]

It's probably impossible for Trump's coronavirus response to have been seen as sane or reasonable, regardless of what he did. For example, Biden very publicly claimed without basis that Trump's China travel ban actually made things worse, whilst meanwhile here in the UK one of the avenues of attack on our government (which is seen as Trump-like) is that our scientists reckon that not introducing a ban on travel from China almost exactly like Trump's made things worse. Trump gets attacked for not imposing a centrally-mandated lockdown, ours gets attacked for imposing too much centralized command and control and not leaving things up to regions. And so on and so forth. Also, no matter how much Covid testing either the UK or US does, it's always described as though it's falling behing the rest of the world regardless of facts. (I wonder if that will magically fix itself once Biden takes office.) And as for hoping to get good outcomes overall... look at what's been happening throughout Europe. It would take something more like a miracle than a basic, workable response of the kind you could expect from a government of typical competence to get good enough results that it wouldn't be seen as a failure. France, run by someone the entire media spun as basically the anti-Trump, has been reporting about half as many cases a day as the entire US with a rather smaller population and they don't seem to be slowing down.

The coronavirus pandemic seems close to a no-win scenario. Even most of the success stories (which, I should note, always seem to be countries very different to Europe and the US) are a lot messier and more ambigious than they look from the million-mile foreign press view.

[ModernMech]

It's one thing to put the best minds in charge of a no-win response and for it to fail. If Trump had put the best minds in the CDC and the NIAID in charge of the Covid response and just allowed them to do their thing (instead of undermining them at every turn), that would be one thing.

Instead he puts his son in law in charge of the Coronavirus response, so we are all left to wonder how it could have been if the experts were in charge. Maybe it would be different, maybe it's a no win situation like you said. But at least then we would know there was nothing more to do. No one would be wondering "Maybe things would have been different if Jared Kushner were put in charge of this..."

We all see the pandemic and how it affects our lives. When Trump tells us that it's no big deal, that it's a media hoax that will go away with the election, that doesn't make him look good. That's a choice he's making to do that. It didn't have to be this way.