Trump is doubling down on the bet he has been making. Trump knows that incumbent presidents ruling over a prosperous country win re-election. He wants to convince people that the country is doing great, so they should vote for him. that is why he tried to downplay the pandemic (ie it will go away in a week, it will go away when it gets hot, etc). Forcing the states to re-open their economies and forcing the schools to re-open is an attempt to try to force life to return to normal. If people feel like things are getting back to normal, then he is more likely to hold onto the presidency.
This kind of thing has worked for him before. For example, Mueller found he obstructed justice like 10 times. But he just repeated "mueller witch hunt" and "total exoneration" over and over and over and over until people started to believe that he was actually exonerated. He wants to do that again. Just tell people everything is under control, tell them everything is fine until people just believe it.
The problem is that this has worked in the past for things no one can actually see for themselves, or at least things they can look away from. People can choose not to pay attention to trump's crimes in office. People can tune out the actual findings of Mueller and just listen to what trump and fox tell them. But people are experiencing corona virus 1st hand. People are getting sick all over the place. 138,000 people are dead. A huge number more have become seriously ill, some suffering permanent health complications. This isn't the sort of thing that people can just tune out. Trump has seriously screwed himself.