Interesting claim, if true did Trump act dumb for them to follow through with an actual pandemic?
"Team Trump received pandemic warning - in January 2017"
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/team-trump-received-pandemic-warning-january-2017-n1161811
That was not for lack of effort on the part of the outgoing Obama administration. The week before Trump took the oath of office, Obama's team prepared an exercise in which the incoming team was presented with a series of hypothetical scenarios – including one in which the world faced a deadly viral outbreak – and how the U.S. federal government would have to respond.
The former official added, "He was never interested in things that might happen. He's totally focused on the stock market, the economy and always bashing his predecessor and giving him no credit. The possibility things were things he didn't spend much time on or show much interest in…. Even though we would put time on the schedule for things like that, if they happened at all, they would be very, very brief. To get the president to be focused on something like this would be quite hard."
Trump recently said that one can "never really think" something like this is "going to happen." Evidently, his team was warned that something extremely similar to this might very well happen, but the Republican's operation didn't much care.