Exploiting 70 days of denial, dysfunction, and distressed property.

Even as the country confronts the greatest disruption to daily life since World War II, a series of new polls released this week show Trump’s approval ratings plateauing in the mid-40s, roughly where his approval rating stood a month ago, before the coronavirus shuttered much of the nation’s economic and social activity.

In other words, public views of Trump’s leadership in the coronavirus crisis are now breaking down along familiar lines of polarization: Americans view his performance during the pandemic about the same way they view his performance generally.

Republicans aren’t sweating public opinion of Trump amid the Covid-19 pandemic, though the Trump campaign last week did tout results from battleground-state surveys that it said showed Trump with far greater approval ratings for his handling of the situation than in public polls.

Whether it’s the consistent polarization that has characterized his presidency or a specific reaction to his response to this grave crisis, it’s clear that Americans’ views of Trump break from U.S. political tradition.

“At the end of the day, the fact that there wasn’t a huge rally effect given the severity and the breadth of this crisis is really what’s unusual here,” said Monmouth’s Murray. “And it says a lot about Trump’s unwillingness or inability to capitalize on a moment like this.”

President Donald Trump has spent weeks promising to protect cruise lines from the economic pain of the coronavirus pandemic. Now a fund that Trump ally Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman controls has revealed a big new stake in Carnival Corporation, the world’s largest cruise operator.

The sudden change of fortunes for a company run by Micky Arison, a longtime Trump associate, could be as much about personal relationships and geopolitics as about business.

A Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) now owns more than 8% of Carnival. It held no stock in the firm at the start of 2020. The news prompted Carnival’s share price to climb 20% ― the company’s biggest percentage increase on record, The Wall Street Journal reported.