When Fauci said "very very low risk to the United States" and then that it needs to be taken seriously by public health officials, that's downplaying it. Within the context of his speech he was saying he didn't see this as a threat for the US but just in case it does come here the public health officials need to be aware of this virus and prepared for it.
Here's a clip of various outlets during the same time Trump was "downplaying" this and who criticized his early actions. If we are going to hold Trump responsible for "downplaying" this we should also hold the media responsible for doing the exact same thing and creating a narrative that was similar to Trump's. After all if the media and Trump were saying the exact same thing, is Trump only to blame? People listen to the news to find out what's going on and if many news stations are saying no big deal (both conservative and liberal) then how do you think people will respond?
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Was his response perfect? Nope, absolutely not and hopefully he has learned from it. Hindsight is 20/20 and it's easy for us to look back on this and see what should have been done differently. Also, Trump wasn't sitting on his hands for 1.5 months hoping this would go away, the entire time he was doing things in the background and working with agencies to address it. For example the critical month seems to be February when the testing needed to be rolled out. There are various issues there but one of the big ones was how the CDC and existing red tape were a big reason why there was such a delay. Here is a very fair summary of this below.
"
Most critical for this second phase, it was clear early on that any effective response was going to depend on rapidly scaling our testing capacity. The virus genome
was publicly available in mid-January, and the first tests were developed shortly thereafter. The World Health Organization (WHO)
sent hundreds of thousands of tests to dozens of laboratories around the world by early February.
But the administration and CDC decided to rely exclusively on domestically developed tests, apparently in keeping with past practice. The CDC developed its own test in early February, which was then distributed to labs. But, as became clear roughly a week later, one of the reagents in its kits proved to be faulty, which meant that most labs were unable to proceed using CDC-provided test kits.
Nevertheless,
for at least two weeks after the problem became clear, alternative paths to testing were either neglected or stymied by existing regulations. Indeed, although the Emergency Use Authorizations required by the declaration of a public health emergency were meant to facilitate rapid testing, it soon became clear that their required procedures were actually significantly retarding the development of effective testing at scale. CDC was reassuring state and local officials that testing capacity was adequate in late February, although it was
reported that fewer than 500 tests had been conducted at that point. (CDC’s own
count, which includes its own tests plus those of U.S. public health labs, puts the total number of tests at the end of February at around 4,000.) Perversely, the failure to test at scale kept the publicly recognized number of cases low, which served as a justification for insisting that the existing testing regime was adequate."
Source
I don't blame Trump at all for going with the past practice of using domestically developed tests. The faulty reagent in the kit was not his fault AND on top of this there is
evidence the CDC actually LIED to Trump. Furthermore, Dr. Fauci has publicly stated that Trump has followed his and other officials advice and recommendations throughout the process. There are definitely areas that the response could have been better for sure but it wasn't like Trump was sitting around for 1.5 months waiting for this to go away either. There were steps taken in February to prepare testing but due to red tape and the issue with the CDC initial tests this dramatically slowed things down. Once that became clear Trump turned to the private sector and things really began to ramp up after that. I think if he knew this in advance, that the CDC would have such issues, he would have turned to the private sector first.
