‘Hundreds of thousands of lives could have been saved’ by Trump’s government says US journalist

The United States should have been the country best prepared to handle a pandemic.

Instead it became the world’s worst affected country – with more than 590,000 lives lost to Covid.

The writer Lawrence Wright has been trying to find out what went wrong, diving deep inside the Trump administration’s response in his new book The Plague Year.

I talked to him earlier and began by asking him how much of what happened in the US was down to Donald Trump’s sense of American exceptionalism?