So to be clear, you believe: Cuomo deliberately ignored credible data from his people suggesting that the state would not need 30,000 - 40,000 ventilators in order to attempt to do political damage to Trump?

> In the meanwhile I'm glad Trump ignored the political damage Cuomo was inflicting

A notable feature of Trump's response to the crisis has been his inability to ignore criticism from others. One could argue that the silly video he aired last week was a byproduct of his total inability to ignore political damage from folks like Cuomo!

> Doing so would be utterly disastrous to other hotspots

I agree, in hindsight. But it would also have been far fewer than New York said it needed. Cuomo believed he needed 30,000. The national stockpile is around 9,000.

From The Guardian on 2nd April: "[New York state] has 2,200 [ventilators] in its stockpile and Cuomo said 350 people severely afflicted by the virus are coming into hospitals every night needing such breathing assistance."

> Yeah? Politics is certainly not be the main reason why he did it, but are you going to argue that it did not factor into Cuomo's initial, confrontational tone?

Cuomo's original criticism of the government came on March 8th, when he said "they've been slow and they continue to be slow". After this, on March 16th, Trump singled him out as a governor who "needs to do more". On March 25th, Trump said Cuomo was "happy with the job we're doing", which prompted Cuomo to reply that he was not happy.

> Trump aired a clip of Cuomo today during his presser which you will never in a million years see on CNN. You should watch it. They at first botched it in the live stream, but then played it again a little later. Had I not told you about it, you wouldn't even know it exists. Think about that for a second before you read further.

I watch his entire press conference every day, and you're right that they did include a clip of Cuomo saying that he was happy with how the response had gone. If I recall (apols if wrong - a lot of these clips are blurring into one!) the same clip outlined the basis for his requesting 30,000 vents. Something he has done elsewhere, too: ""I hope the President's right. I'll go better than what the President said -- I hope I don't need any ventilators. But I can't govern that way -- I govern on the data and on the numbers and on the science," he said, adding that if "you count the numbers and the trajectory, we're looking at 40,000 possible ventilators, 140,000 possible hospital beds -- those are the numbers."

And it doesn't really have anything to do with whether Cuomo was right to go public with the ventilator need.

> You people still don't see that he does this on purpose. He's not speaking to you, anything-but-Trump voter.

I see what he's doing. Every time Trump appears like a moron to me I know that he's engendering support and approval from his constituents. I call that video silly because it was an extremely clear manipulation of events. You might argue (and you might be right) that his misrepresentation of his actions as being perfect is a necessary correction to the media's presentation of his every action as moronic. But you cannot escape that the President was for several weeks comparing COVID-19 to the flu (he's now done a 180 on this) and pushing a dangerous drug cocktail ("What have you got to lose?") which resulted in at least one person dying.

The damage to his credibility is done by his attempt to whitewash his response. The man clearly isn't prone to intense self-reflection, but he has missed a spectacular opportunity to win over moderates by saying, "You know what? I got these things totally wrong." Nobody expects him to be perfect, and doing so would show everyone a contemplative side of himself. (By most accounts he has the capacity to change his mind when wrong privately, and he listens to expert advice.)

> He speaks to his base, and swing voters, and he successfully penetrates the confinement the mainstream press tries (unsuccessfully) to put him into. He really has no other choice.

The way I see this, and I might have bias here, is that his language is so vague and imprecise that he leaves himself room for misinterpretation at every step. The counterpoints he has presented -- what I think you're referring to as the confinements the MSM puts on him -- are not "you said X, but the truth was Y" disproof by counterexample. They are "you guys are nasty and I'm doing a very good job and here are videos of people saying I am doing a good job".

If he was an employee of yours or mine, you'd say that there is an optics issue. He is, in his opinion, maligned and misunderstood and misperceived so frequently that it becomes incumbent on him to take steps to be, if you'll excuse me, "unimpeachable".

> Look, I'm not a fan of his public speaking skills, and I wish he tweeted less, but I can see that it works 100% of the time. Whether you like it or not, this is why he won, and this is why he's going to win again. You can't deny that whatever it is he's doing is effective, even if you don't understand it.

The public speaking skills are, by the way, one further area which builds the composite image of Trump as a man who is not smart. There might not be a correlation between coherence and efficacy as a leader, but to the >50% of voters who did not vote for Trump in the last election, his rambling is a signifier of his being ill-equipped for office.

You could put it another way: part of his job is to be good at communicating to the public, and it seems like the best anyone can say about him is "he talks to his base".

> Shit, the dude maneuvered the DNC into nominating a gaffe-master with dementia and a closet full of extremely damaging skeletons before the real race even starts, while dealing with impeachment (successfully) and then with a country-wide disaster (also, so far, successfully - see the projected vs actual casualty counts).

Whilst I am largely convinced that there is interference in US elections, I'm pretty sure that the DNC did that to themselves :) Biden is not a strong opponent to Trump, I agree.

I don't disagree with your views on decentralisation. I think that Trump's strategy has been fine. I think he has been negligent and it has cost thousands of lives.