Is this country, despite its might, less able to protect its citizens than other developed democracies? Or, to put it even more bluntly: Did immigrants like me make a terrible mistake when we decided to come here?

If you had asked political scientists to predict which countries would be especially well prepared for an unprecedented threat to the lives of millions of people like the one we are living through now, they would likely have pointed to a simple factor: state capacity. The richer a country is, the more developed its institutions, and the larger the workforce on which it can call in a crisis, the better it is likely to perform.

If you had asked public-health experts, they would likely have gotten a lot more specific. The quality of a country’s response, they would have pointed out, depends on such factors as the number of doctors and ICU beds in the country, the existence of scientific labs that can carry out the crucial work of detecting and testing for a new disease, and the public-health infrastructure that can coordinate the response.

From both a political-science and public-health standpoint, the United States seemed well prepared. In one recent attempt to measure the capacity of different nations around the world, for example, the United States was bested by many Scandinavian countries but still beat such countries as France and Japan. And when the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health released the Global Health Security Index last year, the United States actually came out on top.

But the pandemic reveals that, when it comes to an actual crisis, the United States seems to be a paper tiger—one that is adamant on picking a big fight with the nearest shredder.

What good is all that state capacity when the president dismisses an extraordinary threat to public health as a “hoax” for crucial weeks? And what good are all those tools to fight a pandemic when the federal government threatens to withhold those resources from states whose governors don’t sufficiently flatter the president’s ego? It will take months or years until we can begin to estimate just how many lives America lost because of the shame and misfortune of having elected Donald Trump to the White House.

But for all the needless suffering Trump is causing, the full list of people who share the blame is long and varied. It includes both the president of Liberty University, who insists on reopening his campus, and the mayor of New York, who has only managed to unite his city in disdain for his incompetence. And it includes both the newscasters who confidently assured their audiences that the coronavirus could not possibly turn into a deadly pandemic and the leaders of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who insisted on developing their own, faulty test for COVID-19.

As a result, the United States now has more patients who are suffering from this disease than any other country in the whole world. Even now, the number of its cases is increasing at a faster rate than in virtually every other country.