Luckily a weak congress can be replaced. I see nothing that has happened so far personally that cannot be democratically corrected.

> Typically, democratic means voting people in Congress in, then Congress votes and represents their constituents

That's still happening.

Sure, presidential electors should be appointed by state legislatures and the administrative state is unconstitutional.

But if we aren’t relitigating all that: we have an administrative state, to which Congress has delegated vast authority. Given that, how is it possible to argue that we should then further insulate that administrative state from accountability to the only elected official who can effectively hold it accountable—the President? What’s left?

That view reduces the elected government to a meta-government. Congress’s job is to make largely jurisdictional and procedural rules for the civil service to follow, and the president’s job is to mind adherence to those rules. But actual policymaking is delegated to the civil service, which is insulated from elections.

The spoils system is good, actually, and I’m persuaded that’s how the constitution was meant to work. People who voted for Trump loved that he put up a slate of people he was going to appoint with concrete visions of how they were going to run the government. That seems democratic to me.

Sorry but the spoils state is called corruption and is totally bad in all forms. If you want to curtail the so called administrative agency then the parties have to win elections by dicisive margins. Or the president and judiciary can force Congress to pass laws.