Hello and welcome to Whistle Stop, a podcast of Campaign Curiosity's Presidential Greatness Edition.

I'm John Dickerson of Face the Nation.

Well, we are back.

Although in a slightly different form, this podcast started as an experiment.

And after 36 episodes, we're going to call in an even three dozen in phase one of the experiment.

Construction on phase two begins now, which is to say that we are going to turn our attention to other matters.

First, we're going to look our attention to other matters. First,

we're going to look into why we refer to ourselves in the third person. Second, we're going to

take on the presidency, shifting the content of this podcast, not from the antics of those trying

to get into the White House, but to the antics of those who were successful in getting there.

The campaign version of WhistleStop was animated in part by the 2016 campaign raging around it.

We have a new president now, Donald Trump, and so we have a new sense of animation.

My interest in the presidential campaign has always been driven by my interest in whether or not campaigns show us anything about

whether the candidate is fit for the office of the presidency. Well, we're past that question now.

Whistle Stop's episodes only glanced on that idea, but now I'm going to look at it more

in terms of the presidency itself, the fitness and attributes of the president

more directly. At least that's my hope. But in the same way that the campaign stories gave us

context for the 2016 campaign, I hope these stories give us context for the current presidency.

We are in a time of dropping standards and a changing time when long-held realities are being thrown overboard and we are

discovering new realities and what is new and what's not new when Donald Trump appears to set

his advisors against one another is that his own particular brand of chaos?

Or does that match what FDR did by design and what Clinton may have done by mistake?

...