Trump's Plan Was Do Nothing

The evidence keeps building that Trump never intended to implement an organized national government response to the pandemic. At first, that failure may have been due to the fact that the impact of Covid-19 was falling disproportionately on states that Trump considered Democratic controlled. As the disaster grew outside of the blue states, Trump had already abdicated responsibility for any coordinated national response and he decided to heap the blame on state governments and add gasoline to the anti-mask and QAnon driven movements that were willing to align with his "let them die" approach to the pandemic.

...Kushner and Trump’s twisted view was that it “wasn’t government’s job” to step in for a nation in crisis. The shortages, the scrambling over supplies at an ever higher price, the nurses who were forced to wear garbage bags and the patients who were turned away by overtaxed hospitals … that was the plan. Infection and death didn’t happen by accident, and it didn’t happen because Trump and Kushner weren’t warned against the consequences of inaction. Suffering was by design.

No matter how many times Trump and his supporters claim “there was no playbook” for the COVID-19 pandemic, there absolutely was. Plans for a government response to this type of pandemic had been written, revised, war gamed, and practiced for decades.  It wasn’t the lack of a plan that caused disaster. It was refusal to follow the plan.