system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Who the US president is makes very little difference in the lives of US citizens

The US President is often called the most powerful person in the world. This is technically true, but fails to consider the power of groups. Both congress and the supreme court as groups have much more power than the president at a federal level. Long term change comes from these bodies instead of the executive branch more often than not. The broad trend of elections into congress makes much more of a difference than the presidential election. The president will often have an agenda which changes things, enact it, then mostly do minor and expected things. These agendas are almost always things congress or their parties were planning on doing anyway, just made slightly easier. Often times, big agendas are reversed by the next president or congress put in power. 

This is only at a federal level, however. State and local elections arguably make much more of a difference, and change on a state level is much less inevitable and linear than change on a federal level. In the personal lives of most Americans, the budget and laws of their state impacts them much more than anything at a federal level. 

Therefore, the actions of the president have almost no direct effect and very little indirect effect on most Americans most of the time. Where there are sometimes big changes, these occur more often at the state or local level.
gpt
Rapid change requires the Congress & Presidency to work together.

More importantly, it’s *mostly* the Senate & President.  Just those to bodies can determine the makeup of cabinet departments and the Supreme Court, which have major immediate & long lasting impact (respectively) without the need to actually pass legislation.

This is alarming because the Senate & Presidency are fairly non-representative of the electorate, given that the senate (vastly) disproportionately represents rural states and the presidency is routinely decided by 2-3 states.

So, when you have a hyper-partisan president aligned with a hyper-partisan Senate leader those checks and slowdowns are bypassed.

Trump being president wouldn’t matter if not for McConnell and *vise versa*.

Short term, national legislation tends to have the most immediate impact to the top 1% and bottom 20%-ish percent due to immediate changes in taxation and social program funding.

For the rest of us, the impact is longer term and more indirect - but just as important.  Trade deals and education funding might not change the middle class day to day, but they’ll shape our economic prospects long term.