The thing is he could also have done a macho move by ordering a huge lockdown, have military on the streets, but control the message the way he normally does: claim he was in early, say the economy would have been worse if he hadn't, blame China, point fingers at BLM for defying his orders, and so on.
That seems to fit just as well with his playbook, he just went for the wrong pill.
I think huge lockdowns would have pissed off his base to a greater degree than it would have reassured wavering conservatives. But just shutting up and making sure that his name was on the stimulus checks would have been enough to see him home.
So, assume Trump had a huge lockdown and put military on the streets, trashing the economy, running roughshod over the states, and playing into every narrative about being a totalitarian. Then what? We know from countries in Europe tha tried lockdowns that Covid would just be back in full force by the time of the election. It'd make him look both dictatorial and ineffective, a self-proclamed germophobe that tried to send an army to fight a virus and lost, a paper tiger.
In Europe, it went way down before coming back strongly. In the US, it just stayed big and grew.
The thing about doing something is you can always claim what you did was necessary. It's asymmetric. Do nothing, and if the problem doesn't go away you're an idiot. Do something, and if the same thing happens you can claim it would have been worse if you hadn't. There's always some example somewhere you can abuse to say whatever you want.
Whether someone did badly depends on expectations about how it would have gone if they had done otherwise. Like in sports, you judged less harshly if you lose to the favourite. If you let the "otherwise" happen, people complain that you let it happen.
"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done."
Note I'm saying nothing at all about what ought to be done about the virus, just how to handle the PR.
The economy, or by Trump's barometer, the stock market, would have been fine. The Fed juiced the economy and then some, SPY is currently trading at pre-COVID all time highs.
Secondly, it's much harder to pin the blame on ~230,000 Americans dead to negligence if Trump actually took some action. Even if COVID came back in full force, you could then say that we have successfully flattened the curve and are now much better at treating the virus.
That seems to fit just as well with his playbook, he just went for the wrong pill.