If he had wanted to ensure a plan for distribution the least he could have done is hold a normal transition with the new administration that was going to be implementing it. He refused. He was too busy calling up state employees trying to get them to overturn the election results.
Josh Marshall explains what he was up to:
From the very start of the Pandemic in the first weeks of 2020 the Trump administration consistently sought to disclaim responsibility for things that would be genuinely difficult and could have challenging or bad outcomes. Push the tough tasks on to others and if it goes badly blame them. This frequently went to absurd lengths as when the White House insisted that states short on ventilators at the peak of the spring surge should have known to purchase them in advance of the pandemic. Over the course of the year Trump spun up an alternative reality in which the US was somehow still operating under the Articles of Confederation in which individual states were responsible for things that have been viewed as inherently federal responsibilities for decades or centuries.
But the impetus wasn’t ideological. It was mainly a means of self-protection and risk avoidance: arrange things so that the administration could take credit if things went well and blame states if they went bad. Nowhere was this more clear than in the months’ long crisis over testing capacity. Since the administration was actually hostile to testing in general and couldn’t solve the problem in any case they simply claimed it was a state responsibility.
This is the origin of the White House’s “plan” to not have a plan to inoculate the country. The federal government would manage the relatively easy task of airlifting supplies in bulk to states at designated airports and then let the states figure out how to get them into people’s arms.
It was an incredibly hard task and the best solution was to put it off on someone else so the White House didn’t get the blame. It’s really that simple. The through line to Trump’s Pandemic response from January through his final day in office was protecting himself. It really is as simple and depressing and disgraceful as that.
Trump always takes credit forsuccess that is not his and blames others for his failures. He knew the pandemic was a big problem which none of his flunkies and cronies were capable of fixing so he decided that he would blame the governors. He did that from the very beginning, particularly the governors of the big, blue states. Recall:
This story in Vanity Fair about how Jared Kushner personally took the reins:
