The scariest thing about Don’t Look Up is that as absurd as it is, it barely exaggerates. Much of our political elite are just as greedy and foolish, our media just as vapid, and our response to impending disaster exactly as mind-bogglingly irrational as in the movie.
It's well document that Preisedent's politics change when they become president. Part of becoming the defender of the establishment.
that doesn't necessarily contradict what I have said, if you are in the role of president you are pressured or encourage to think and choose certain things. Your options are pre-determined long before they get to your desk, or you sit in for a meeting. I have read Robert Gates memoir, The Operators by Michael Hastings, and Nightmare Scenario (I know three books are not the best sample size) but one of my key insights is that they predetermine a lot of the options for the president long before he even hears "the problem" and is given a solution. The political machine doesn't start with them, it's all around them and he just has the privilege of being blamed when he pulls the (wrong, in our perspective) levers, all the time. And when the president chooses wrong or goes off-script, the amount of inertia in the machine just grinds his bad decision to a halt. So he is both "the most powerful person" and the "weakest" in the administrative sense. It just takes a certain kind of psychopath to wanna be president.