I think some governors - Cuomo, Whitmer, Newsom, Wolf,
et al. - really were malevolent in the steps they took after mid-March 2020. They delighted in being dictator for a day (or for months on end). I mean, seriously - prohibiting people from buying vegetable seeds for their gardens? Good grief.
Others in government probably were misled by the so-called experts who insisted that masking, distancing, closing down businesses, shutting up grandma in a nursing home full of sick people, etc., really were the only way to prevent millions upon millions from dying. I'd put my state's governor in that category. He was led around by the nose by those advisors, and I suspect that's kind of what happened with Trump. It was, "How do I know, I'm not an infectious disease expert, but if all these
actual experts are telling me to do this ..."
Whether Fauci is an expert on anything is debatable, but at least now we know he had financial motives for making the Covid response as onerous as possible.

Maybe Trump really did it to ensure losing the election. I don't know if his mind works that way.