I disagree that it’s similar. In the US, despiee the congress passing laws or not, which affects the general bulk of the legislative process, the president is a figure of extreme power. As demonstrated even recently, the president is free to pass executive orders bypassing congress (which Trump did 220 times in one mandate) and bypass the legal system by unilaterally forgiving people who have been convicted of crimes (which Biden used to bail out his own son) and appointing supreme court judges and heads of critical regulatory state organizations unilaterally without approval of congress (which makes the agencies like the fda, ftc, epa and usda essentially toothless and ineffective at carrying out their functions properly). This is no small power. You can trade off on massive quid-pro-quo on that. He CAN do it not because the party he leads is brainless and are unable to argue, but because they stand to massively gain on his decisions if they support him. Why ? Because the US president has a ridiculously disproportionate amount of power focused on one single person and the US people simply have to suck it up. What are you going to do, vote for the OTHER corrupt party ?

No position of the European hierarchy has even close to the amount of power the US president has over that many people. No one in the EU can unilaterally appoint heads of the European Court of Justice or regulatory organs, no one in the EU can say a convicted felon at the ECJ level now walks free because he’s the son of the president or the friend of the president. Nothing in the US works remotely similar. The US structure is, imho, made in such a way that it’s liable to incur severe corruption, a fact that is not only public knowledge, but lately both parties even overtly flaunt how much they can bend the rules to their personal gain and nobody is even doing anything. Look at Biden, look at Trump. It’s a travesty.