| | | I'd suggest you and Jay continue to be misled how little importance the president of the United States holds in directing the government and the economy.
If . . . the president acts in concert with the desires of the Congress, the vast majority of Americans and in accordance with the legal system and courts a president can appear to be very powerful.
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But when a US president falls out of sync with these other parties it becomes painfully obvious how limited their power actually is.
No one can legally force Trump out of the China negotiations, but as with the "new NAFTA agreement" he negotiated last year, his agreement is meaningless if Congress doesn't vote his "negotiated agreement" into law - and nobody is voting for his new-nafta. Which is an instructional learning experience for him regarding China negotiations. On top of that every time Trump now tries to get involved in the China negotiations he's publicly humiliated by a huge number of people until he backs out.
You shouldn't feel sorry for him because he signed up for this and he could have retained more influence had he had taken advice more often, but he's never been that person so the results are predictable.
You might find parallels with another of America's least influential presidents - William C Harding - 29th President, 1921-23
Harding was an Ohio newspaper publisher who eventually rose to become U.S. Senator; he preferred poker, socializing and, it was said, womanizing to working.
Republican bosses favored Harding, however, finding him charismatic and pliant, and he won the presidency in 1920 promising to restore pre–World War I "normalcy" (his mangling of the word normality was ridiculed by critics).
In office, Harding appointed a slew of corrupt officials, prompting the Teapot Dome bribery scandal, which for the first time sent a Cabinet secretary to prison. An accused adulterer, Harding was the subject of a best-selling memoir by his mistress Nan Britton and the mother of his illegitimate daughter.
Harding is most remembered for the Tea Pot Dome scandal and for having died in office.
Earlier in his career he bought a newspaper and used the railroad pass that came with the paper to attend the 1884 Republican National Convention, where he hobnobbed with better-known journalists. Harding returned from Chicago to find that the paper had been seized by the sheriff responding to creditors claims and he had to become a reporter for another paper.
He lives on partly as a cautionary tale told by author Malcolm Gladwell. In his book Blink, Gladwell says the "Warren Harding error" led supporters to assume he'd be a good President simply because he appeared stately and presidential. It didn't quite work out that way.
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