I’ve noticed with increasing frequency that various commentators on the media talk about who runs the country. Many right wingers think that Joe Biden was supposed to run the country but didn’t and, instead, he deferred to a troika who ran the country. Many people across the spectrum think that Donald Trump currently runs the country.
They’re all wrong. No one runs the country.
Think of all the decisions that you make in a day. On how many of them does the U.S. president decide? Close to zero. He can influence your decisions, but he doesn’t run your life. And if he doesn’t run your life and doesn’t run the lives of over 300 million other residents of the United States, how could he run the country?
What people may mean is that the U.S. president runs the federal government. But that’s not true either. Recall your civics class. There are 3 branches of the federal government: executive, legislative, and judicial. The president runs the executive branch and even there, there are executive agencies with some autonomy. Think of the Federal Reserve, for example. So at most the president runs one third of the federal government.
On a related note: People often say that the president is the commander in chief of the country. No, he’s not. He’s the commander in chief of the military, which is less than 1% of the country.
