How can one differentiate between utter incompetence centered around and embodied in Donald Trump and deliberate "benign neglect" (to borrow a phrase from the Nixon administration)? I can't do it, not even with the aid of the Atlantic article (whence I got my conspiracy theory description).
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
I don't think it's an either/or, though; no one, I am sure, has actually decided that black Americans should be incarcerated at a rate of 2,306 per 100,000, while the equivalent figure for white Americans is 450 per 100,000, or on the very different treatment of the epidemics of opioid vs crack dependency, but I'm sure if white Americans were being imprisoned in such numbers, or the "war on drugs" prosecuted with equal vigour in poor rural white communities as it is in poor black urban ones, then the Republicans would take a rather different approach.
Trump seems primarily, if not exclusively, concerned about how the pandemic affects his chance of re-election, and appears indifferent to most other considerations -- that doesn't suggest a conspiracy of any sort, so much as a simple failure to take into account the effects of particular policies on particular groups, because those groups just don't matter to him.