President Donald Trump is now the most unpopular he has been during his second term.

More than half of American adults disapprove of the job he is doing, and he’s underwater on nearly every important issue of the day.

The polling averages show this net disapproval clearly: On the economy, he’s down 13 percentage points. On inflation, he’s down 20 points. Even on immigration, he’s down 2 points. (Those negative marks include foreign policy, though it’s too soon to say how the public is reacting to Trump’s decision to join Israel’s bombing of Iran.)

Still, Trump’s popularity decline has been a dramatic development: After entering office with a positive approval rating and popular support for his agenda, he’s squandered much of it away through various political fights, policy decisions, and public spectacles.

That reversal has come in fits and starts, yet also demonstrated a curious trend in Trump’s popularity. When Trump is at the center of the news, using his bully pulpit and making high-profile efforts to pursue his agenda, his popularity falls. When he recedes into the background, and the public is focused elsewhere, his popularity somewhat recovers.

In short, the more people pay attention to Trump, the less they like him — which creates a kind of conundrum. Trump, who’s uniquely capable of capturing the limelight, has shown he’s also incapable (or unwilling) to do anything quietly.

Immigration policy is the latest example of this trend. Public opinion turned sharply against Trump’s response to protests in California over raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Views of his deployment of the National Guard and a few hundred US Marines to the West Coast have similarly been resoundingly negative. And overall views of Trump’s immigration policy, as a result, have fallen to their lowest point this year, per tracking polls by YouGov.

Beyond any one policy, these trends in public opinion suggest that Trump is turbocharging two features of modern presidential politics. The first is the idea of negative polarization: that members of one political party are bound together and mobilize against an opposing political party or movement more strongly than for their own side. And the second is of the electorate as operating a thermostat: preferring the opposite opinion or direction to whatever the president, or party in power, says.

These shifts matter. They tell us a lot about Trump-era politics and about how modern American politics might exist after him. And they offer a clue as to how the........

© Vox