Don't miss this preview of the rollercoaster season we have coming your way. We are swinging for the fences, and we'll probably gain a few enemies along the way. That's how we know we're doing our jobs right!

Forty-three men between 1789 and 2017 demonstrated the awesome and growing power of the American presidency. Sometimes they were blunt, other times much more deliberate. But in 2017, something shifted, and since then we've seen how extremely fragile the presidency is, too. The two men who've held the office since then have exposed its frailty over and over again. One battered norms with open contempt, mistaking spectacle for strength and grievance for governance. He treated institutions as obstacles to be humiliated into submission. The other stretched executive authority past its snapping point in the name of restoration, governing through emergency and exception. Then that first guy came back, but worse, and that's where we are now. Whether through chaos or consolidation, they both marked radical departures from the managerial, post-Cold War presidency. They weren't course corrections -- they were disruptions. Joe Biden and Donald Trump: the Aberration.

Part 2 of 2: Daddy left unfinished business in the Middle East, so Bush 43 comes to the White House in 2001 with a mission, and whether he accomplished it or not really isn't up for debate -- he didn't. That didn't stop him though, and the damage he did in the White House made his successor's election seem like salvation may have arrived. Spoiler alert: it didn't. The White House is where altruism goes to die. And the first Black president in American history revealed something ugly in this country, paving the way for horrors to come. Part 2 of the Accelerants -- George "Dubya" Bush and Barack Obama.

Part 1 of 2: Riding his predecessor's coattails into an office that had already gone off the rails, George H.W. Bush didn’t bother asking where the brakes were. He put the pedal to the metal. He and his successors put power on a fast and dangerous track with emergency authorizations, executive orders, surveillance dragnets, corporate and banking bailouts, and forever wars, all designed to look strong on TV and in social media feeds. They used every crisis as an excuse for a procedural shortcut, and then turned every shortcut into precedent. The Oval Office became a reflex factory: act fast and first, don't apologize, and deal with governing when the cameras are gone. Hesitation is failure, restraint is bad business. In this first part of a two-part episode, we'll cover Bush 41 and Bill "Slick Willy" Clinton.

Inheriting a world reshaped by total war, nuclear brinkmanship, and nonstop mobilization demanded more than managerial skill. As the U.S. slid into the Cold War, presidents acted less like careful stewards of process and more like final judges of what counted as necessary, legitimate, and urgent. They waged wars without declarations, kept secrets without oversight, and shaped markets, morals, and memory by sheer force of office (and occasional charisma). The imperial presidency fused commander-in-chief, moral advocate, and national sovereign into a single role, pulling power ever closer to the Oval Office even as the bureaucracy beneath it swelled. Authority flowed downward, justified by crisis, sustained by fear, and made routine through repetition. Harry Truman through Ronald Reagan: these are the Authorities.

Presiding over a growing territorial and overseas empire takes a lot of power vested in the one-man office of the American presidency. The expansive scope of the President's authority had grown well beyond what a single man could control by the end of the 19th century; in the 20th century, presidents relied more and more on the growing power of the entirety of the executive branch. Administrations became exactly that -- sprawling networks of professionals and politicians that all reported to the top. Bureaucracy was the new order of the day, and it came often at the expense of domestic tranquility and international harmony. Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin D. Roosevelt, on the Administrators.

If a president of the United States won't stand up and declare unwavering support for equality, then who will? Isn't that what this country was founded on? That's what Abraham Lincoln thought, but when he was murdered in 1865, what he thought no longer seemed to matter. His next nine successors continually dropped the ball when it came to protecting Black civil rights, and their collective support for corrupt big business interests just leaves a bad taste, in our opinion. Andrew Johnson through William McKinley, the Abdicators.

The next eight presidents, from Martin Van Buren (#8) to James Buchanan (#15) all served only one term as president, and they spent their terms more or less trying to appease the various national factions that threatened to pull the country apart. This was, unfortunately, especially true when it came to appeasing the slave powers of the South, entrenching and intensifying the national debate over slavery and its expansion for decades. It would take a different kind of appeasing on the part of Abraham Lincoln (#16) to save the United States, but even he doesn't get out of this unscathed. We're calling them all out.