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I wouldn't go quite so far as to call the actual Democratic position that a president is a figurehead only, Obama was quite muscular at times, but a generalized respect for process and credentials and expertise is certainly baked in to the pie in a way Republicans have never 100% believed, being slightly more individualistic where Democrats can be a little collectivist (within their subgroups at least - the party at large less so). The Republican version of expertise looks more like "good instincts" than it does "studied it for years", but they still do believe in expertise broadly speaking, just in a different form, and with fewer criteria. Think 'successful maverick CEO' as opposed to 'tenured PhD technocrat'. A CEO still needs to have a good business, but how they got there is less critical.
Trump thinks, and arguably always has if you look at his past, that it actually doesn't matter if you have a good business. People just need to think that you have a good business, and then they assume you have expertise to back it up. 80% of the result with 20% of the effort. Now that's business!
He projects this attitude on his subordinates. Some of them even believe it. You don't need to actually kick all illegals out of the country. You just need to be loud about it, and make liberals sufficiently apoplectic, and everyone will assume it's working. You don't need to actually find a cure for autism, you just need to say you did. You don't need to actually save the government money, you just need to drum up some exaggerated numbers and declare victory. Mission Accomplished. It's 1984-lite. And then the ultimate trick? If later it becomes evident the action wasn't real, fire someone, blame them, replace them, quickly distract the public with something else new and outrageous and ambitious-sounding and then you can even repeat the cycle later. In that sense, anyone other than him is replaceable, and Trump never has any motivation to actually grill a subordinate about their actual plan, because it doesn't matter. The goal is reputation, respect.
What's new about this? Internally, most presidents do actually grill their subordinates about their plans. I listened and read a number of the Nixon tapes, we can literally see the day to day stuff going on inside the White House. He's very regularly giving specific instructions to diplomats, maneuvering legislation, getting Vietnam updates. Trump? He watches TV. I'm really not joking, it's a common thread in virtually every account. If he sees TV complain about a policy, then he calls up a cabinet member and grills them - about the TV coverage. I happen to think that it's not only backwards, but historically unusual.
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