You're confusing lazy cynicism with realism. Patrick Bateman is a fictional character. The vast, vast majority of people, including even most soldiers, and definitely pretty much all businesspeople, no matter how unscrupulous, do not have the capacity to violently murder a person they know and harbor no ill will towards with their own hands on short notice.
maybe they should make the person with the codes black. I think several cold-war presidents probably wouldn't have a problem with that
The whole damn point behind the idea is to achieve the exact opposite. Make it someone, through whatever criteria, whom the president will have a problem killing, so he'll only do it under the most extreme circumstances.