He should have acted in 2018 and told John Bolton to not disband the specialty group in the National Security Counncil that was established to monitor pandemics, in order to protect us. He should have paid the proper attention to the daily briefings by the clandestine services which unndoubtedly included infomation intercepted by the National Security Agency's data mining of Chinese military and civilian communications. These, very probably, included information from monitoring of what was hapening in Wuhan. He should have listened to Dr. Nancy Messonnier, of the CDC, when she prescribed social distancing and other actions to prevent the spread of the disease. Instead, he tried to have her fired for warning America. He should have offered, in January, to help governors and mayors act aggressively to contain the disease early on, instead of downplaying the potential pandemic, predicting it would disappear "like a miracle."
His public positioninng appeared to be related to the record high Dow Jones Industrial Average, which would have been a perfect foundation for re-election campaign claims that things improved on his watch. His problem was, and is, that he follows only short term strategies. In my opinion, he saw people warning about the disease as threats to the stock market. A real leader would have seen that a short term loss would have resulted in a long term gain, when the disease was addressed and mitigated early, so that the economy could recover faster. He dug in and made enemies of anyone warning or acting to mitigate the disease progression, until the stock market went South. If he had acted, or stayed out of the way and let the experts act, he would be poised to win re-election by a landslide. As it is, he stands a good chance of losing in November, and taking many down ballot Republicann candidates with him.