maybe i missed something, i did watch it to the end, including the 'retribution' comment

How many deaths would Trump have prevented had the response been different? How many are to be blamed on American public health, state responses, and federal policy specifically?

Given that the UK has a worse death rate per capita, is Trump more or less responsible than Boris Johnson?

The UK had a pretty shitty handling of the situation. Boris "I shook hands with a Covid patient and then spent a week in the hospital" Johnson has his fair share of the blame.

I'd say at least half of them could have been prevented. The sad thing is, if Trump had done a mediocre job, he would have EASILY been reelected.

I can't say if the UK did a worse job than us overall because their population density is much higher than ours and it ramped earlier for them than us. Having said that, I think it's generally agreed that they had one of the worst European responses.

And the United States has abysmal public health facing a disease that kills almost exclusively those with comorbidity.

If you account for that, and for NY's needless deaths, what does it do for the overall picture?

Trump's response was poor. But to say he killed 200k Americans deserves the "pants on fire" fact check it certainly won't get.

I've yet to see anybody suggest a workable solution for preventing New York's deaths.

Best I've gotten is putting the elderly in tent cities, which I don't see as a valid alternative.

All the more reason to have policies that protect people and take it seriously!

Didn't they create ghost hospitals? I would think anything is better than sending infected directly to the people most vulnerable and then watching as thousands of them die.

But these are tough decisions, and maybe Cuomo made the best one he could with one go at it and a great deal of uncertainty. Sweden decided to forgo shutting down entirely, we'll have to see how these decisions stack up in 5-10 years when this is over and done with. Blaming Trump for X number of deaths is blind dart throwing at this point in time.

Blaming Trump for any specific amount of deaths is suspect, but we can say that in virtually all cases he made the decision that was basically the opposite of what was suggested by the available evidence, and he showed basically no leadership during the entire debacle.