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I don't think there's ever been a President intelligent enough to actually do this across the span of domains. It's always been a job of delegating.
Who exactly run things in any major power structure? Never a single person. Your complaint is so breathtakingly naive. Visit any Fortune 100 boardroom and see how they do it. If anything, the President gets a leg up on most of them since he gets to select his entire set of advisors fresh. Of course those people wield influence over the Prez and over each other: they are positively selected for that!
Of course there are genuine problems, but those are problems inherent to the leadership of any large institution.
Indeed. And they can't actually do that without delegating a broad swath of authority to their cabinet and advisors because there is simply too much, even for a non-diminished President, to possibly try to steer.
There is no democratic accountability in the US political system between elections! None. Never has been! This was a specific intentional choice of the Founders as compared with the contemporaneous systems in Europe in which elections could be called at any time.
The only democratic recourse we have is every 2 years to vote new people into government and the back pressure this causes on officials that don't want to tank their chances.
At best, what I take from this is that Presidents should make a habit of pre-announcing their high level appointments before the election so that voters can better assess the entire package of leadership they are voting for, rather than after.
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