The GOP is all-in on Trump. There’s no way they can repudiate him and survive, so they have to go in the direction he leads. If you had to make decisions with the constraint that you can’t contradict Trump, what would you do?
Republicans are also working off of the idea that the economy needs to be back to normal by November for them to win and treating all losing scenarios as catastrophic. They need to gamble to have a shot at winning.
And the longer you lock things down, the more justification there is for expanding the welfare state. They don’t want to be put through public negotiations where they are working to deny benefits and bailouts to working class folks who can’t survive without help.
And some of them, quite frankly, completely agree with the gun-wielding protesters.