Trump may be experiencing what political scientists call the “rally-around-the-flag” effect, when national leaders temporarily get more popular amid international crises. Usually, you hear about people rallying around the flag after terrorist attacks or outbreaks of war, but the coronavirus pandemic could qualify in that it too poses an imminent threat to American safety. “When a country is faced with a common threat that touches everybody, there is a tendency to unify and to look toward the leader,” Shoon Murray, a political scientist who has studied the rally-around-the-flag effect, told FiveThirtyEight. “The sense of emergency is now so high and widespread that it’s possible people could rally around the president if he was perceived as taking steps in a nonpartisan way to mitigate the crisis.”
