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But the American president is not a figurehead, he is meant to be the one running the country. If the Prime Minister's girlfriend is in fact the one making the picks as to who gets a job, that is an unfortunate reality, but the girlfriend was not the one elected to do the job. If the Permanent Under-Secretary for Filing Cabinets is the one running the country while the President goes golfing, that is not what the people decided should happen.
And if that is what happens, then the people should be informed, not laughed at for being too dumb to realise that they have been lied to for decades.
It's unfortunate that so many people believe this, but this isn't really the case. The perception of this has more to do with candidates over-promising on the campaign trail than what civics classes actually teach. Let's check the Constitution and see what kind of language it uses about the President. I'll pick out the most relevant bits:
What kind of vibe do you get from this? He's in charge of the military, pretty much full stop (exceptions for declarations of war), but most of the other duties? Notice how often there's a give and take between Congress, the officers that the President supervises, heads of departments, and the President. Even the foreign policy stuff is supposed to be "by and with the Consent of the Senate". The Constitution is pretty clear that although he's supervising the executive structure, he doesn't have full control. He can appoint a lot of people, but the most important ones must have Senate approval. He can appoint (and nowadays, does extensively) a lot of "inferior Officers", but the Constitution is pretty clear that this is actually Congress' right intrinsically, but that they may choose to delegate to the President (or alternatively the department heads themselves, who are Senate-confirmed, and this is also decided by Law, i.e. both houses of Congress). To me, this doesn't really sound a whole lot like "running the country". The whole point actually IS that a very large number of the actual bureaucracy is a supposed to be a joint effort between the legislative and executive branches, with the whole back and forth between appointments, nominations, confirmations, etc.
That is, the people with the levers of power are still chosen by an indirect democratic process. That's why the US is a representative democracy, we are supposed to elect people with good judgement, and then there's a series of checks and balances between those people as they hash out the details amongst themselves, so to speak, with periodic input from the electorate. Even the design of the elections, famously, is intended to strike a balance between responsiveness to public will (which is good) and resistance to fads (which are bad). Of course the two are difficult to distinguish, so you kind of want the best of both worlds: that's why there are two houses of Congress, for example, and you'll notice a lot of this "Advice and Consent" is specifically given to the Senate, which is the more long-term outlook of the two (six year terms, with only a third up for election at one time in any given cycle). Again, that's by design!
The modern fact that the Senate, specifically, has devolved way too much power to the President is a known issue, and publicized if you're paying close attention, but not really a Constitutional one per se. They could claw back a lot of this power if they wanted to, even now.
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