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The POTUS absolutely helps set legislative priorities. This is even more true for Trump, who's basically the God-King of the Republican Party at the moment.
Trump can yell at GOP congressmen, but that's pretty much all he can do. He can't rain fire and brimstone on them or flood them out. And the congressmen, while being very pious in appearance, are right now very reluctant to actually follow Trump's commandments (where have I seen this kind of thing before?) and actually do things. All Trump can threaten them with is to primary them (sometime in the future) and even that may be not that much of a threat for those who has a strong local base, and given there's 220 of them, nobody gets more than 1/220 of the fault if nothing happens, which isn't a lot of fault. He can't implement the legislation alone, and there's not a lot he can do beyond yelling if GOP congressmen are dragging their feet. He can't executive order them into action.
Eh, I think the more that a bill's vote becomes a close thing (or is forecasted to be a close thing), the proportion of fault for a given congressperson can rise in accordance with how decisive their vote could be. At least, this is how it works with both legacy and social media.
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"Helps" not really in any formal sense. Republican Congressmen are not actually in thrall to Trump to the degree you seem to think. He got very little from the Republican Congress his first term (not even border wall funding!) and seems likely to get little from them his second term either. Key members have interests more or less orthogonal to Trump's. He could possibly pound the table and demand legislation, but I'm skeptical how much it would move the needle - after all, Congressmen are not elected nationally.
They kind of are though. Some House Freedom Caucus members wanted to block the current bill, then Trump told them to fuck off, and now they're supporting the bill.
The fact Trump doesn't get everything he wants has more to do with Trump just being a buffoon who doesn't know how to do politics very well. He can sometimes get his way when he has a ton of political capital, but otherwise his blunt-force trauma style oftentimes fails to work.
Obama was quite involved in passing the ACA, for example, which was a campaign promise of his. source 1 source 2 source 3
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