Being President is an extremely tough job but one of the reasons for it is the fact that pretty much the moment they get sworn on, they are the Man in Charge and have shit to do even if their email systems might not be up. From there on, they have their standard "100 Days" thing in which they propose the bulk of their legislation and deal with whatever foreign policy mess issues left by their predecessor. In a lot of ways, their first year in office is their most important because it's their best chance to get things done and change things and when the expectations are at their highest. This means that a President has to be at the top of their game at the start of their Presidency. Make a foreign policy or legislative mistake and they're stuck dealing with it for the length of their Presidency.

What's tough about this is that in the real world, nobody expects you to be at the top of your game when you start. You just started a job-- how can people expect you to know and do everything? Whenever you show up for your first day on the job, you're usually told to go sit at your cubicle and given a manual to read, something you're stuck doing for a few days or so because usually your phone and email isn't set up yet. Then you're trained by either your boss or the person with whom you're replacing and only allowed to do the job by yourself after a few weeks of being there. Then, for a month, maybe two months, you're allowed the excuse that you've just started and only then will you start being held accountable. And yet, you're still not considered an expert in everything and whenever something big or major happens, people either go to the person with more experience, more senior than you, or the most knowlegable one. It takes a while before you've become a go-to person for everything.

But if you're President, there's no sitting at your cubicle for a few days reading instruction manuals. You have advisers but on day one you're in charge of making decisions and you often don't want training from the person you're replacing because you've spent a year bashing them while running for office and in some cases, you have to spend the better part of the year trying to clean up the hundred messes left by them. And, even worse, you don't get much of a leeway in regards to you being new. Nobody says, well it's okay he bombed North Korea or well, it's okay he gave away too much in the stimulus bill in a stupid attempt at being bipartisan because they're new.

It is, in a lot of ways, maybe the only job in which you have to be at your best at the beginning of the job then the remaining part.