Most polls show Trump getting a noticeable bounce since early March. For objective, rational observers, this is crazy. Trump's handling of Covid-19 has been terrible and counterproductive. The most effective leadership has been at the state level.
Needless to say, this has led to panic among the Manic Progressives.
There is ample reason to believe that Trump's Bump is both underwhelming and ephemeral. Every leader - as Chait notes in the piece above - is seeing a bump, and most of them are greater than Trump's, even in places like Italy that are being hammered. Carter's approval bumped up 30% after the hostage crisis, and we know what happened with Dubya after 9/11.
More importantly, things are going to get worse. Economically, epidemiologically we are in the front edge of this crisis. Go to this site, and see what the range of outcomes is for your state. Most of the population is currently living under shelter in place, but there are large swaths of mostly "Red" states only practicing social distancing.
Let's look at Florida. Governor Dipshit down there is refusing to take the steps necessary to save lives, despite the fact that Florida is famously known for being full of old people. If he stays on this course, cases won't start to explode until April 13th, two weeks from now. Two week after that, the hospital are overloaded. Meanwhile, look at the current epicenter, New York. We are starting to hear the horror stories coming out of NYC, but we are still a few weeks away from overload. New York has begun to institute lockdown procedures that could conceivably work to stop this from happening. If so, NY will start to get better around the same time Florida explodes.
Going back to Florida, the current social distancing policy means this will stretch into June. That means no "V shaped" economic recovery. That means tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of deaths. If anyone thinks Trump will still be coasting along at 49% approval rating at that point, they are crazy. (Please be assured, I'm not rooting for this. I'm simply looking at the data from both a historical and epidemiological perspective.)
More sadly, Trump will never fall much below 37%, no matter how much he deserves to. Trump will - successfully among his base - blame the deaths on China and NYC. They will blame it on impeachment. None of this will be factually true. We knew this would be bad in the first week of February, and he did nothing for six weeks. Nothing. It won't matter to Cult 45. But it will matter to those who are currently giving him the benefit of the doubt in this crisis.
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