A) You're not behaving like there is even welfare though. Like, let's say there was something that caused a bunch of unemployment. Your logic is "there's a bunch of this thing, therefore a ton of people are dead in the streets" as though there's a deterministic line between them and nobody can do anything to stop it. There are like 80 steps between Trump saying something stupid and the post office not delivering ballots, and you're drawing that line as though it's unimpeded.
Imagine you're part of a team. One of the team half the time doesn't do their job, and half the time they do, they screw it up. Everyone else can compensate for and mitigate this dysfunction
to some degree - but nevertheless, more errors are made, more unhappy clients/customers, more staff stress. The higher ranked that person is, the more dysfunction it is likely to create: and sometimes it really is the manager. The team can mostly get by on the humdrum, day-to-day processes, but it's the crises that really tend to expose the problems.
Hopefully it shouldn't need that much imagination, as it is something just about everyone has experienced.
The president might have constraints, and he might have a team to try to tidy up a lot of his mistakes, and plenty of governmental powers may be invested in the legislature and judiciary, but the president still has a lot of power to do damage with mistakes. What the president says and does matters.
320,000 people didn't die from covid in the US, that number only exists because we as a nation are willing to criticize ourselves when everyone else avoids introspection, and even if it was a real, meaningful number, it's not Trump's fault.
It's hard to know how to respond to this, because it looks to me like simply failing to accept reality. Is the magnitude of it too great for you to process? There are also estimates such as excess deaths: the CDC put this at 300k by early October. That being consistent, >320k seems a very reasonable estimate.
We can perhaps be thankful that the federal system in the USA enabled many governors to take action independently of the federal government. However the grim reality is that facing a
national crisis, the federal government went from taking no action, through frantically doing stuff that achieved very little, to giving up. The responsibility for the failure of the executive to respond coherently lies with the guy at the top. It's just not the inadequacies of the wider administration he runs, but that he personally also spent months lying to the public about the seriousness of the situation because he didn't want to be the bearer of bad news, then undermining key measures to protect people, and finally attacking and undermining governors that he had abandoned to cope with the crisis. It is right up there as one of the most pitiful performances by a national leader that 2020 was unlucky enough to witness.
My country likewise utterly flubbed handling covid-19, possibly worse than the USA. It's impossible not to look at peer countries like Netherlands, Greece, Germany and consider how many more people would be alive if the government had not been so thoroughly incompetent. As above, these crises exposed just how poor leaders like Trump are, and how dangerous to the wellbeing of their people and nation.