Yeah, from what I can tell the U.S. currently has fewer COVID-19 deaths per capita than Belgium, Spain, Italy, France, the U.K., the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, or Ireland. Of course, part of the reason for this might be the timing of when COVID-19 hit the U.S. as opposed to when it hit those countries. But it certainly doesn't seem to me that the U.S. has been doing wildly worse, at least when it comes to the death toll, than most wealthy Western European countries. Germany is a big outlier, with about half the deaths per capita so far when compared both to the U.S. and to most of its wealthy Western European neighbors.

It could also be argued that, even if the U.S. ends up having a COVID-19 deaths per capita rate that is similar to that of Western Europe, people in the U.S. will have a harder time dealing with the economic aftermath of the crisis due to weaker social safety nets. Probably a lot will depend on how efficient the U.S. emergency stimulus measures end up being.

The author of the article tries to connect the COVID-19 crisis to the U.S.'s political divisions and to the failures of the Trump administration, but I am not sure that he succeeds. There are many nations that have less political bickering than the U.S. does and have more technically competent and less divisive people in charge of their governments than the U.S. does, but have nonetheless been suffering from the crisis as much as the U.S. has been suffering.

There are plenty of good reasons to criticize U.S. political partisanship and to criticize the Trump administration, but this article strikes me more as intellectually shallow anti-Trump complaining or propaganda, not as a serious and unbiased analysis of the political state of the U.S. and how that state relates to the COVID-19 crisis.