Lawrence Wright exhaustively details the American response to the pandemic in the cover story for this week’s New Yorker. It is a long and infuriating read, masterfully reported and well worth your time to understand how the United States, which should have been uniquely prepared to manage the virus, instead failed in such an unprecedented and shameful way.

The debacles are too numerous to quote, here’s just one example, where the CDC and FDA failed to provide adequate testing and how disastrous that turned out for the U.S.:

Without the test kits, contact tracing was stymied; without contact tracing, there was no obstacle in the contagion’s path. America never once had enough reliable tests distributed across the nation, with results available within two days. By contrast, South Korea, thanks to universal public insurance and lessons learned from a 2015 outbreak of mers, provided free, rapid testing and invested heavily in contact tracing, which was instrumental in shutting down chains of infection. The country has recorded some fifty thousand cases of covid. The U.S. now reports more than four times that number per day.

The pandemic would have been challenging for the United States no matter who was governing — our lack of universal healthcare, how we’ve systematically defunded vital public research, and our national devotion individualism and market-based solutions over collective action show how particularly ill-prepared we are compared to every other developed nation on the planet. That we are the richest nation in the history of the world and allowed this tragedy to unfold is particularly damning. The most American of dichotomies may be it was our research that led to a vaccine but we were unable to contain the outbreak via public health guidance.

The government that faced this pandemic, though, was particularly disqualified to face such a dire threat. One of the few strokes of luck of the Trump administration prior to 2020 was the federal government faced few crises that were not of Trump’s own making — no terrorist attack, no economic collapse. The administration’s response, along with the feckless silence of congressional Republicans, to the California wildfires or Hurricane Maria showed how dismally unprepared they were to deal with the sorts of dangers every government must manage.

Republicans have been failing this test for decades now, the Trump-McConnell government disastrously so. The incompetence of human fiascos like Pence and Kushner coupled with the arrogant, uncaring pathological disdain of Trumpist apparatchiks like Mnuchin combined to debilitate the work of everyone from front line workers to long-serving civil servants. The greatest danger we face as a nation is that those responsible for this monstrous fuck-up aren’t held to account.