This is the best summary I could come up with:

Or you could take the sweeping position that the government as a corporate entity almost always works independently of the occupant of the Oval Office and so an increasingly incapacitated chief executive who does what the process tells him to do would just be business as usual for the ship of state.

I also think the sweeping argument gets at an important reality of governmental power: Conservatives especially have long understood the limited ability of presidents to fully impose their authority on the bureaucracy they nominally lead.

Except that Yarvin also concedes that just occasionally, once in a great while, when the “deep state” can’t agree on policy, the president does have to make choices to resolve internal conflicts in the government — like a Magic 8 Ball being used to yield an answer, he suggests.

One might say similarly that we got half-involved in Syria in the 2010s but stopped short of deep involvement because we elected Barack Obama rather than Hillary Clinton, John McCain or Mitt Romney.

Likewise today: You can say that any U.S. president would be pushed to take some kind of hawkish line with Russia, with Trump’s four years as evidence, because that’s what the “deep state” and its policy process demands.

As Noah Millman suggests, there’s a strong case that “you simply cannot go to war without a functioning commander in chief and that our allies and rivals alike know that and will act accordingly.” And even if that’s an overstatement, with a presidential vacuum, the way in which the United States handles the most serious challenges — military or otherwise — will inevitably tend toward disaster:

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