...started making all kinds of paranoid statements about the "Covid hysteria" of the "left" (gag). You know, instead of actually appearing Presidential: at least feigning concern about rising cases and hospitalizations in the last few weeks, etc.
Trump deserves little or no credit for his "handling" of Covid. From his firing of the CDC intelligence team, ignoring what little early information there was after firing said intelligence team, the discarding of the Obama-era pandemic strategy, ignoring the pandemic to suck up to Wall Street, claiming we would be "back to normal by Easter", and in general making Covid into yet another front in the culture war, Trump made the pandemic even worse whether he intended to or not. Even the one thing he can legitimately claim as his own--freeing up Federal funds and cutting red tape for rapid vaccine development--was mostly ruined by his need to Kulturkampf absolutely everything, including even a public health crisis. For God's sake, every time Trump encouraged his followers to get vaccinated, they shouted him down! Eventually, it became such a media spectacle that he just gave up. 
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