I agree with you main point (power is more decentralised), but the office of the president isn't the important part here.

The president (who is a member of the federal council) is just a largely ceremonial role whose only actual additional political power is having a tie-breaker vote - something that is rarely relevant given that the council has seven members.

The really important part about the Swiss government (i.e. the federal council) is that there are seven equal heads of government instead of one and that they are a perpetual coalition government consisting of all the major parties weighted by their actual parliamentary representation - something that btw isn't written down anywhere it's just an informal tradition that has been kept alive for decades.

I don't disagree with you. But Trump specifically has been selected by the people through a democratic process, we don't disagree here, correct?

My general point is - despite everything else going wrong at every other level of the government, American people, the common Joes of the land, had one very simple option - not voting for Trump. They had this power(arguably, very little in the grand scheme of things, but still) and they decided to use it to elect him and give full mandate to his administration. The rest of America is not a functional democracy like you said - but the fact that Trump is in charge is squarely in the hands of the American people.

Because the option are so restricted, and the people’s influence of the politics, I do not consider the US democratic.

Yes there was a vote, but it is not sufficient. The people don’t hold the power.

The people hold the power to elect or not elect Trump though! I cannot possibly be any clearer about this, and I really hope you don't disagree with this!

It would be democratic in name only if it was like Russia - where you still have elections but somehow the leading candidate wins with 99% of the vote(sometimes even above 100%!). So you have the disguise of a democratic process but the underlying mechanisms don't function.

I honestly don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. You said "this is NOT democracy in action". Trump being the president IS democracy, the US presidential elections are democratic even if the rest of the US isn't. The nature of US being or not being a democracy isn't what I took an issue with, because I do actually think we agree there.

The USA has the lowest form of democracy, where the population cast a vote on a king every four years, hence why I call it only nominally democratic. To make it worse the candidates are already predetermined by powerful people who are vaguely known to the population.

This is why Trump got elected, because for all his faults, he is an outsider to this corrupt system, in the opinion of the voting public. I also think most people expected a rerun of the 2016-2020 period, where he spent more time golfing than actually doing something.

So like I said right at the start, we're playing semantics.

>>Like in Switzerland, where people vote on referendums 4 times a year.

That's a standard that literally every country other than Switzerland will fail though.

What is the point of discussing politics, if you have no influence.