It's probably impossible for Trump's coronavirus response to have been seen as sane or reasonable, regardless of what he did. For example, Biden very publicly claimed without basis that Trump's China travel ban actually made things worse, whilst meanwhile here in the UK one of the avenues of attack on our government (which is seen as Trump-like) is that our scientists reckon that not introducing a ban on travel from China almost exactly like Trump's made things worse. Trump gets attacked for not imposing a centrally-mandated lockdown, ours gets attacked for imposing too much centralized command and control and not leaving things up to regions. And so on and so forth. Also, no matter how much Covid testing either the UK or US does, it's always described as though it's falling behing the rest of the world regardless of facts. (I wonder if that will magically fix itself once Biden takes office.) And as for hoping to get good outcomes overall... look at what's been happening throughout Europe. It would take something more like a miracle than a basic, workable response of the kind you could expect from a government of typical competence to get good enough results that it wouldn't be seen as a failure. France, run by someone the entire media spun as basically the anti-Trump, has been reporting about half as many cases a day as the entire US with a rather smaller population and they don't seem to be slowing down.

The coronavirus pandemic seems close to a no-win scenario. Even most of the success stories (which, I should note, always seem to be countries very different to Europe and the US) are a lot messier and more ambigious than they look from the million-mile foreign press view.