And yeah, that national response is the job of the executive branch. So very roughly 150k americans are dead now because Trump was in office. Somewhere around there.
And yeah, that national response is the job of the executive branch. So very roughly 150k americans are dead now because Trump was in office. Somewhere around there.
But it's a silly digression anyway. If you don't think NY is a good example, then pick Oregon. Or Canada. Or Germany. The point is that lots of large-scale responses of the form a "typical" democratic administration would have taken have very clearly been effective. While the US response, nationally, has not.
You seem to be considering "freedom" as equivalent to irresponsibility. Being a leader means convincing people to do work they don't want to do, like wearing masks during a pandemic. We don't even need to debate whether the federal government should have implemented a national mask mandate. Simply having a president that recommended wearing masks instead of encouraging indignant irresponsibility would have saved tens of thousands of American lives, no laws required.
Trump gets called a dictator because he unilaterally picks nonsensical ideas and then barks them at everyone to get done, while accepting no feedback about how things are actually working out. This is the behavior of a dictator, regardless of how much power he actually wields or how effective he is. The latest example is his hissy fit over losing the election - there's no basis in reality, yet he's continuing to push it anyway. Seeing someone acting like the law does not matter sets off the fascist alarm bells.