No it doesn’t.
Anyway, you’re a poor sort of Illuminatus if you can’t get a loyal slave elected as President.
But that’s the point. Why do you need a slave to become president? Why not get yourself elected President? And then declare that there’s a period of emergency and you need to run again, and repeal the 22nd amendment, and make yourself president for life, and rule the country with an iron fist?
This sort of thing worked for Stalin and Franco and Mao and any number of lesser dictators and strongmen. What exactly would Stalin have to fear from an Illuminatus? What does he gain from obeying orders? He’s afraid of assassination? But how do the Illuminati go about assassinating people? You need soldiers and/or ninjas, yes? Why do the ninjas obey the Illuminati?
This is the thing about power. You have power when people obey you. And people obey you because they believe they’ll be better off when they obey you. And they think they’ll be better off if they obey you because you can offer them rewards or threaten them with punishments. So when the dictator orders the soldiers to take that guy–no, not that one, the other one, the guy with the hat–out back and shoot him in the head, why do the soldiers obey? The soldiers obey because they have a nice job with lots of perks, and they’re also afraid that if they don’t obey then they’ll be the ones taken out and shot in the head, and then their families.
But this only works if the soldiers have reason to actually fear the dictator, and actually have reason to believe in the rewards of the dictator. And of course, the punishments and rewards of the dictator are not actually carried out by the dictator, but by everyone else. The dictator is only a dictator because everyone obeys.
So when the dictator is driving down the street, the cops all know to stay out of the way. But what happens when an Illuminatus is driving down the street and gets pulled over by a local cop for speeding? The Illuminatus has to order the cop shot? Fired? He calls the president, who calls the governor, who calls the mayor, who calls the police chief, who calls the desk sergeant who calls the patrol officer to let the guy go?
And so in real life, real life Illuminati have to be actually powerful people in their own right. Karl Rove gets pulled over for speeding, and the local cop recognizes him, and knows that Rove is well connected, and so lets him off or offers to escort him on his way. Maybe he doesn’t know Karl Rove could make a phone call and have him tortured to death, but he knows that Karl Rove is an important person, and if you help important people you receive rewards and avoid punishment. Note that the punishment or reward doesn’t have to be dire–the cop might just worry that Rove might call the police chief and bitch about officer so-and-so, and he’ll be stuck in parking enforcement for the rest of his career. Or maybe Rove will call up the police chief and say officer so-and-so helped me out, and when the next promotion comes up he’s got a leg up.
But all this works because the peons know who the important people are, and the important people know who the other important people are. Not that you know every face, but when someone has the trappings of wealth, power, and influence you know to treat that person as if they have wealth, power and influence. And this is how con men work–act as if you own the joint and people will assume you own the joint. So acting as if you don’t have power is a good way to not actually have power when it counts.