I don't think you can deepfake Donald Trump. The man is a recursive deepfake of himself.
In any case, 2020 might be the first time enough voters realized that a bull run on Wall St doesn't move the needle much for their own economic well-being.
Realizing Covid wasn't going to go away and coming around to addressing Covid in June 2020 or so wouldn't have affected the market, which had already priced in Covid. But it would have made Trump an actual crisis-time leader with the corresponding popularity boost just from leading people through a difficult time - publicly validating the hardships everyone is feeling goes a long way. But instead, he dug his heels in opposition to how things were developing.
If anything, I think saying that Trump is a basic contrarian is a better predictor of his positions. The problem is that while our society has major flaws that make contrarian viewpoints compelling, contrarianism on its own does not produce useful reforms.
Mostly in blue states! back then, red states where doing fine, but Seattle & New York were the first major epicenters. It was a deliberate political calculus to cast Democratic-led regions as inept. Florida "banned" New Yorkers for a bit. Minimizong COVID also made businesses happy, so it appeared to be a 3-fer for Republicans, until it boomeranged.
On the contrary, being confounded by an inconsequential challenge is a bigger sign of ineptitude than the reverse.
Wall Street was on a bull run leading into 2016 too, and that realization was one of Trump's arguments at the time. Once he won, he dropped that line, but if 2020 was such a time, I'd count 2016 too