Over the last 24 hours, President Trump has aggressively widened the circle of people or countries that are making it impossible for Donald Trump to handle the coronavirus. In a Thursday night interview with Sean Hannity, Trump complained about Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer (“She is a new governor and it’s not been pleasant”), Washington governor Jay Inslee, and the demand by various hospital staff for more ventilator machines (“You know, you go to major hospitals, sometimes they’ll have two ventilators. And now all of a sudden they’re saying, ‘Can we order 30,000 ventilators?’”). Friday, on Twitter, he added General Motors CEO Mary Barra (“Always a mess with Mary B.”)

Trump happens to be enjoying his highest approval ratings at the moment. It is possible he will somehow maintain, or even enhance, his current standing. But his handling of the coronavirus — even from the narrow perspective of politics, which is how Trump himself views it — is doing almost everything to ensure that his bump is short-lived, and will eventually be followed by a long, steep decline.

Trump’s recent polling bump is real. The important context, though, is that every leader is getting approval bumps, and almost all of them are getting much bigger ones than Trump. In France, Emmanuel Macron’s approval is up 13 percent. In the U.K., Boris Johnson — who arguably bungled the crisis worse than Trump did, originally proposing to let the virus run its natural course before admitting he had miscalculated and reversing himself — has seen his job approval soar from about even to two-to-one in favor. (Even Jeremy Corbyn’s net approval is up ten points.) The government in Italy, currently enduring the worst coronavirus outbreak anywhere, has soared from net negative to over 70 percent approval. In the United States, more than 70 percent of Americans approve of the job their state’s governor is doing to handle the coronavirus.

The breadth and depth of the pattern strongly suggests people are rallying around their leaders in crisis, regardless of either the quality of the decision-making or the results to date. Rallying around a leader in the initial stages of a crisis is a well-known public-opinion phenomenon. After Iran took Americans hostage, Jimmy Carter’s approval ratings rose 30 points. Against a backdrop where every leader is enjoying soaring, almost rapturous levels of public approval, Trump’s step up to almost 50 percent approval should be seen not as good news, but as a devastating political indictment of his leadership style. It’s like a Major League Baseball player competing against high-schoolers and hitting 0.280.

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