For Trump, approval seems to be the end. No president has ever been so publicly consumed with his approval numbers. We have George Gallup, the originator of the Gallup poll, to thank for this ambiguity. And Trump’s low approval numbers, which could easily have been a death sentence for another president’s agenda, have not much impeded his legislative progress. Taking stock of this, a recent Politico headline asked, “Has Trump made approval polls meaningless?”A more plausible explanation is that the diminished meaning of political approval is what made Trump.

Source: New York Times February 20, 2018 09:56 UTC