No, I think it's much simpler than that.

Trump has no concept of how exponential growth works. He sees New York has x many cases today. They had y yesterday. He thinks that means they will have x + (n*y) n days from now.

He just never took or understood that statistics class in college.

What New York REALLY needs is really more like x + x*2^n where n = days/3 (doubling every 3 days).

So New York has 44,000 today and had 37,000 yesterday). Trump thinks this means they'll have 44,000 + (3*(44,000-37,000)) = 65,000 in three days. In six days, Trump figures that number to be 86,000. Because he thinks it's linear growth.

What New York will ACTUALLY have if they continue to double every 3 days is 88,000, in six days, they'll have 176,000.

The gap in his mental estimate gets much worse the further out you project. That's why the idea that they'll need 30,000 ventilators seems preposterous. He's thinking linearly, not exponentially. Because he doesn't have the mental capacity to do so.