… If presidential approval ratings are mired in partisanship over the long term, it means, in essence, that they’re broken as a tool for evaluation. The more significant problem, of course, is that political actors would never be rewarded or punished for any actions they might take, so there’s not much disincentive to simply reward a political base.
For Trump in particular, it means that his instinctive sense of what he wants to do will consistently be rewarded with the status quo. CONT.
Philip Bump, Washington Post