… Donald Trump is trying to redefine coronavirus as a foreign threat (“the Chinese virus”) and himself as a wartime president defending the nation against what amounts to an invasion. …
Trump “is now leaning into the notion of being a wartime president in part because somebody told him that war time presidents get reelected,” says Democratic pollster Geoff Garin, who recently completed a national survey on public reactions to the crisis. “But my view on this is that the right analogy is that he’s a disaster president and not a wartime president. From a political perspective this is much more like a national version of Katrina with the waters rising much higher and lasting much longer than it is like Pearl Harbor or 9/11.” …
Gene Ulm, a Republican pollster, doesn’t think Trump is doomed to rising discontent over his response. But he does believe Trump is hostage to events, and operating with limited time. Ulm anticipates the key to the political reaction will be how long American life remains heavily disrupted. “There is limited tolerance in time for this,” he said. “And I think that the key function is time, where people want normalcy, they want a plan on a glide path to normal.” CONT.
Ronald Brownstein, CNN