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B. Who is running the country? I'm serious.

Since Biden took over it's a combination of Pelosi, Schumer, Ron Klain, and Jeff Zients.

If you have to pick one, it's probably Pelosi because it was she who organized and timed running Biden off and swapping Harris into the reelection campaign.

Think of it like a fast food franchising situation, where the manager (White House) mans the day by day operations but once in a while corporate headquarters (Pelosi) steps in to refocus or weather a crisis (Biden losing his mind).

edit - to quote Max below:

Who knows. I'm curious as to who was running the country when Trump was president, since he seemed mostly disinterested in the whole affair. Maybe we will find out again

I'd rather reposition this question as "who is most influencing the nation through the President?"

During Trump's time it might've been Sean Hannity, to whom Trump shared a lot of late night calls with.

double-edit - to quote from the article who Trump's influencers were:

"All White House phone numbers begin with the same six digits: 202-456. Hannity calls the White House switchboard, a number listed publicly, and reaches an operator. The operator refers to a list of cleared callers, a few dozen friends and family members outside the administration who may contact President Donald Trump through this official channel — among them his adult sons, Eric and Don Jr.; private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman; media billionaire Rupert Murdoch; real-estate billionaire Tom Barrack; Patriots owner and also-billionaire Robert Kraft; and Hannity."

Who knows. I'm curious as to who was running the country when Trump was president, since he seemed mostly disinterested in the whole affair. Maybe we will find out again

Feels probable at this point. 

Will be something to see what that staff gets up to. 

I'd argue there's a protest vote, as your state's presidential electors are not in doubt.

As I've said my typical vote here in CA for the Presidency is for the Libertarian candidate. I don't have to worry about voting for the lesser of two evils, as the outcome in this state is never in doubt. So--to the extent anyone cares--my vote is a vote of no confidence in the major parties. 

It doesn't even matter what whack-job the Libertarians have nominated; it's not like I'm voting for the person, and it's not like the vote matter because they'll never get elected. It's purely done as a reflection on the major candidates. 

I used to look at the PUBLIC schedule for Obama, suffice it to say it was "light".  They'd have the PDC listed, but by all accounts Obama "read" the PDB, which isn't the same thing as sitting through one and asking questions.  He'd have some meeting in the afternoon with some poohbah or other, rarely, very rarely, a Cabinet meeting.

OK, he was "on the phone" doing whatever the rest of the time.  Maybe.  I got the impression he sort of mailed it in.

My position has not changed in my lifetime.

I voted the same in every election. It's why Clinton got my vote in 1996. I trusted him more than I did bob Dole, as a leader. I felt Dole was a weak Majority Leader in the Senate and I didn't think he was presidential material. 

Clinton's platform matched closely with mine and the economy was humming (which is why he won, as Richard Nixon predicted). 

This was obviously prior to the disastrous policy of the sub-prime mortgage stuff that he pushed late in his second term. He lost me there. I predicted disaster at the time, and it happened in 2008.

I've become socially more liberal, and fiscally about the same.  I don't care either way about "gay marriage" and whatnot.  I would have objected to that in 1970 or so.  It wasn't even a topic.  I didn't know any gay people anyway, that I knew were gay.  

The notion that ANY politician today is "fiscally conservative" to me is a bad joke.  None of them are beyond maybe some words.  Maybe some of the really kooky ones are.

I would check the libertarian box if I voted even though their candidate is usually a goof.  It means he'd get 11,213 votes instead of 11.212 votes.  Yay.  I wrote in this time.

Seem to me he was running the country, since he fired anyone who didn't align with him.

Yeah, I'm not sure you can say anyone else was running the country.  He didn't keep staff or cabinet members around for long, and there's certainly not much chance he'd listen to anyone else telling him what to do, anyway.

You can certainly argue that he might have run it haphazardly, or poorly, or both... but whatever happened, was coming from him, and not someone else pulling his strings.

Of course, the idea that the president "runs the country" is a bit amiss, anyway.  The legislative branch makes the laws, and the judicial branch adjudicates them.  A president could sit back and do pretty much nothing, and the country would still continue to operate.