It has been said that the current president is the Dark Souls of US presidencies. Which, to be sure, has a certain ring to it, but it lacks the virtue of truth. Let's explore the issue for a spell.
Dark Souls is a series of games built around the notion of gradual player progression. The games might seem hard at first, but if you stick with it you learn how to overcome that difficulty and become good at what the games ask you to do. The difficulty is not mechanical - the challenges do not require superhuman reflexes or superior skills to overcome - but rather psychological. By failing, again and again, the player gradually learns what needs to be learnt. The reward for this application of patience is the opportunity to excel whenever new situations arise that require the very thing just learnt. It is the player leveling up, rather than the player character.
Meanwhile, in the background of all this character development, a world and its long tragic backstory is ever so subtly unfolding. It is not a simple backstory, where this happened after that, but a series of subtle implications of social relations and emotional states of mind. Complex social processes led to cascading catastrophic outcomes which in turn sparked other social processes which -
It is a deep and complex backstory, and for the sake of brevity, it will all be ignored. Suffice to say that much of it is left unsaid, and that the player will have to piece it together from archeological fragments, old legends and features of geography.
From this description alone, you might see what I'm getting at. Gradual self-improvement through patience, slowly unfolding understanding of past events through contextual knowledge, and the characterization of subtle states of mind - neither of these things are applicable to the current president, even with excessive use of shoehorns or cherrypickers.
There probably is a past president that would live up the title of the Dark Souls of US presidencies. But that is a topic for another cycle.
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