This was a really good article about what lies on the other side of the lockdowns and why a hard lockdown is a preferable strategy to a half-assed flattening of the curve: https://www.google.com/url?q=https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56.
I'm thinking Trump may fully realize that ongoing soft social distancing will cause more aggregate damage in the long run, but prefer it because that damage is disproportionately borne by the Democratic base. A full lockdown would spread the pain much more in the direction of his base.
Anecdote, which is not the singular of data: Yesterday I drove from my urban core out about 90 minutes into the countryside. The heavily Democratic city is basically shut down. The people who aren't getting paid are disproportionately young, and/or black, and/or brown. The entire area is composed of safe D districts, but the economic damage is most focused even there/here within the D base.
Once I hit the ex-urbs, and certainly out in the rural areas, it looked like business as usual. Parking lots were full, roads full of traffic. This is also a hard core Trump district.
It doesn't seem far fetched to imagine that this dynamic is playing out around the country, with urban, Democratic areas bearing most of the burden for social distancing, and rural, Trump areas basically going on as usual.
If I were Trump, with not only a base to please but also professed malice for Democrats, cities, and brown people, I can see why drawing out the pain and concentrating it in cities is far preferable to locking everything down so that it also impacts ex-urban and rural areas.