A Tragic Anti-Hero
When Avedon Carol wrote
If I were a kinder person, I might actually feel sorry for the boy king – he tries so hard to be better than his dad, but he either repeats his errors accidentally or, in trying to out-do him, screws up royally by deliberately departing from the old man's decisions.
she led me to realize that the current president is essentially a tragic figure. One doesn't really want to go so far as to call him a tragic hero since, to quote the Wikipedia article on that topic, "A tragic hero is a protagonist who is otherwise perfect except for a tragic flaw, also known as fatal flaw, that eventually leads to his demise", and one doesn't really see this President as "otherwise perfect".
Perhaps "tragic anti-hero" would be more appropriate. It's not obvious whether his tragic flaw is hubris, although that certainly figures into the mix. More than likely, hubris is central to the actions of those around him, his "loyal friends", who conspire to make him the tragic anti-hero.
Nevertheless, there are ample identifying characterics for a literary, tragic figure: a son, not gifted in any notable way, who lives perpetually in the shadow of a father whose expectations — as the son imagines them — he is unable to meet. He is inexplicably elevated to a position of power for which he is inadequate, by untrustworthy people whom he trusts, people whose motivation is to manipulate him to serve their own nefarious ends. The office, instead of making the man, crushes him. His constituents, who support him blindly, project onto him their own longings without question, believing that his own convictions match theirs when, in fact, he has no convictions of his own. Ultimately, they all turn on him, exposing his tragic flaw, leading to political conflagration and a spectacular failure to triumph as the greatest president in history, his one authentic dream.
Gosh, I'd start writing the opera if John Adams and Alice Goodman hadn't already done such a good job of it with "Nixon in China".