What really strikes me is that coronavirus could have been a vote winner for Trump if he'd handled it well.
He would have had to take the long view that an early, hard lockdown was the right thing to do regardless of what it did to the economy or his ratings.
He would have had to allow the CDC to make decisions based on science, and worked much more effectively on getting the states what they needed. He already ploughed a huge amount of cash into the economy - I'm not sure he needed to do any more there.
He would have taken a HUGE amount of flak while the economy crashed, the stock market tanked, and people expressed their resentment at being forced to stay home. He'd have hated being unpopular, and he'd have had to hold tight through that period.
By now, if the US had done it right, Covid would be well under control, the economy would be almost all the way to reopening, and businesses would have been able to restart.
People would be grudgingly saying 'Hey, he did a good job. Things are getting better.'
I say all this because this is what some of the state governors chose to do. They took so much flak for it - a month ago Trump was referring to the governor of Maine as a 'dictator'. Now in Maine life is almost back to normal - there's still some social distancing, and we have to wear masks, but we go out shopping, eating, drinking, see friends, go to the gym... and we don't catch Covid in the process.
Our company has outlets all over the east coast of the US, and the ones in the states that reopened carefully (against Trump's advice) are the ones that are by far doing the best.
Our outlets in the Carolinas and Florida are tanking, and we can see no end to it.
I don't see now how Trump can pull things back in time now - he will have to force people to go through the required pain to control Covid, before they can get to the point of enjoying the reopening process, and he needs to do that before the election. He's going into the election while presiding over a big fat failure.