The empty pageantry was perhaps best encapsulated in a March, Friday-the-13th appearance in the Rose Garden in which Trump declared a national emergency and rolled out an aggressive testing initiative that still hasn't materialized to this day. One by one, Trump called a bunch of corporate titans to the mic who where supposedly stepping up to make widespread testing available across the country—an initiative he’s already pulling the plug on. The topper was the supposed launch of a testing website that didn't actually exist yet and was never intended for broad public use. It still doesn't exist. About a month later, a raft of new polling shows Trump has already burned through whatever benefit of the doubt the public had given him.

Multiple polls released this week from CNN, Quinnipiac, Monmouth, and others show Trump is underwater by at least several points in his handling of the national coronavirus response. Similarly, Trump's overall job approvals have almost all started reverting back to pre-coronavirus levels. The Reuters/Ipsos graph below on Trump's COVID approvals shows the clearest trajectory of how Trump initially seemed to benefit from his increased presence at the Task Force briefings. Note Trump's crossover into positive territory around mid-March and then his reversion to negative territory around the beginning of April. In the poll, Trump currently sits at 53% disapproval/42% approval for his handling of the coronavirus.

Anecdotally, journalists and opinion writers are starting to clue into the fact that Trump may have already snuffed out his opportunity to be seen as a decisive leader heading into an election that will now clearly be a referendum on his handling of the national response to COVID. On Thursday, the Wall Street Journal editorial board lamented "Trump's Wasted Briefings."

"A friend of ours who voted for President Trump sent us a note recently saying that she had stopped watching the daily White House briefings of the coronavirus task force," the board wrote in its lede. "Why? Because they have become less about defeating the virus and more about the many feuds of Donald J. Trump."

In fact, the more reliant Trump has become on the briefings, the more combative and useless they have likewise become. More and more, the real experts stand silenced behind Trump while he blathers on for an hour-plus, mostly spewing disinformation and lashing out at journalists. Trump clearly forgot the briefings weren't actually about him, they were about the American people. Just like with everything Trump takes over, he was bound to corrupt it until it became useless. But this time, Trump managed to do it publicly, every day, on an urgent matter of life and death.

Perhaps one of the most damning data points to emerge in these polls is that people don’t think Trump is pulling out all the stops to save lives. The Reuters/Ipsos poll found that just 38% of Americans were satisfied that Trump’s administration was doing everything possible to stop the virus, while 47% said they were not satisfied. CNN asked whether Trump could be doing more to fight the epidemic, and 55% said he could while just 43% said he’s doing everything possible. In both instances, Trump is roughly 10 points underwater on the question of whether he’s making every effort possible to save American lives.

Just think about that for a second. We haven’t even hit the apex in terms of total deaths claimed by the virus. Imagine how much more enraged people will be when they tragically lose a loved one to a disease they believe Trump only made a half-hearted effort to combat.