Opinion | Should Biden Freak Out About Trump's Coronavirus Bump?

Well, you notice that mostly if you’re skeptical and paying a kind of pointillist attention, focusing on the dots. What many Americans do is pull back and see the larger, gauzier picture, and that’s of the president surrounded by serious people who are under his command. While Fauci, Birx and some others are there to make sure that rationality and expertise are injected into Trump’s decisions — and should be commended for that — they wind up sanitizing and upsizing him. Call it accidental validation.

There’s something additional to consider: Trump’s minimization of the crisis looks different to different areas of the country. It looks most appropriate in places that haven’t recorded many cases of coronavirus infection yet, which happen to be some of the same places that voted for him.

“There’s a great swath of the country that is experiencing more what Donald Trump is describing than what you and I are experiencing,” Beth Myers, a prominent Republican consultant and longtime senior adviser to Mitt Romney, told me. (Her home, where she’s sheltering in place, is in the Boston area.) “Their lives are going on while the economy is cratering,” she said. “Now, that may change, but right now, it’s an urban-centered crisis. How does the person in rural Wisconsin think about everything? My guess is that they think that Donald Trump has the right tone: We have to take this seriously but not let it stop the country.”

In light of that, I’d expect a more impressive Trump bump, especially because there’s a long history of Americans’ rallying around the leader during a national crisis, when they’re emotionally invested in believing that they’re in sturdy hands. George W. Bush’s approval rating soared above 80 percent after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But in polls released over recent days, Trump’s approval ratings ranged from 45 percent to 50 percent. Yes, those were high for him, but in a period when the country has a motive for giving him the benefit of the doubt, shouldn’t those highs be even higher? In the Real Clear Politics average of recent polls late Friday morning, Trump’s disapproval rating, 49.3 percent, still eclipsed his approval rating, 47.3 percent.

That’s why Biden shouldn’t freak out too much. Trump may have a captive audience, but he’s still a captive of his own profound limitations.

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