I'd call it gross negligence, much like the Bush administration's disregard of warnings about terrorist attacks, only even worse. Bush's people were still operating with a Cold War mentality before 9/11 and didn't take the IC's warnings about Al-Qaeda seriously because they couldn't (or didn't want to) comprehend the dangers posed by non-state actors. Condoleeza Rice's expertise in foreign affairs was almost entirely related to the Soviet Union and North Korea, and as NSA she looked at foreign adversaries through the prism of that experience. Rumsfeld's political experience, starting with Nixon, was under the Cold War as well. And Bush himself didn't know shit about anything. Despite warnings from the IC and the Clinton administration, they paid little attention to the growth of terrorism in the middle east, and that negligence led directly to 9/11 and the debacle that followed.
But Trump's negligence wrt COVID-19 is even worse because everybody was predicting an epidemic - and even so, Trump actually dismantled the task force Obama created in connection with the Ebola outbreak, and then threw away the handbook and cut the CDC's budget. Then, once the epidemic could no longer be ignored, Trump, as usual, appointed the most uninformed and incompetent people to manage it (Pence and Kushner!), the only criterion being their loyalty to him. As it gets worse he keeps changing course because he and his minions have no idea how to manage the basic requirement of getting resources and funds to the places where they are needed most. Since he does not believe in government, he is trying to allocate materials through the private sector so money can be made. But I don't think he wants to make it worse because his most important goals are getting himself re-elected and his ego stroked, and the worse this gets the worse his political future becomes.
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