A month ago there was much ado about a slight uptick in Trump’s job-approval numbers. But the real story was the slightness: Past presidents had experienced greater bumps during crises, when Americans tend to rally around their leader. For Trump there was no such rallying — just a grudging, incremental benefit of the doubt.

A fleeting one, too. His uptick quickly took a downturn, reuniting him with his anemic norm. According to the polling average at FiveThirtyEight as of late Friday afternoon, 52.5 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance. Only 43.4 percent approve.

True, his favorability ratings weren’t any better in 2016 — in fact, they were worse — and he got to the White House regardless. But the dissonance of that victory could be explained partly by what he represented: a protest against the status quo. Now he is the status quo, and voters have had a chance to sample the disruption that he pledged. It tastes a lot like incompetence.

Other numbers tell an even scarier story for Trump. In all three of the battleground states that enabled his Electoral College victory three and a half years ago, he’s currently behind Biden — by 6.7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, 5.5 in Michigan and 2.7 in Wisconsin, according to the averaging of recent polls by RealClearPolitics. That website also puts him behind by 3.2 points in Florida, a state he won in 2016 and must win again.

Wisconsin alone should terrify Trump. In 2018, the Republican governor was ousted by a Democrat. So were the Republican lieutenant governor and attorney general. Then, this month, Wisconsin voters replaced a conservative incumbent on the state’s Supreme Court with a liberal challenger, her victory not just surprising but resounding. There’s no way to spin that in Trump’s favor.

According to monthly polling by Gallup, the percentage of Americans who indicated satisfaction with the way things were going in the country plummeted to 30 percent in mid-April from 42 percent in mid-March. Only twice before in the past two decades has there been a one-month decline that precipitous.

Maybe this drop was less a referendum on Trump’s stewardship than a recognition of the coronavirus’s devastation. But maybe not: Surveys reveal that a significant majority of Americans believe that he acted too late to stem the virus’s spread. He’s also out of step with most Americans’ appraisal of what will and won’t be safe in the immediate future.