talk to tonight, i want to talk to nbc presidential historian michael beschlos want to talk to tonight, i want to talk to nbc presidential historian michael beschlos want to talk to tonight, i want to talk to nbc presidential historian michael beschloso want to talk to tonight, i want to talk to nbc presidential historian nt to % michael, thank you f here. delighted. great to see you. this is disorienting news today. i think steve bannon has been a disorienting figure in terms of things that have happened before in presidential politics. right. he seems like an ahistorical figure already. his departure now seems like both a shock and something that is hard to contexualize. can i just ask you, historically speaking, has it ever been a landmark moment, a key turning point when a white house staffer left? almost never. and that s why i think this is a really big deal tonight. and the one moment i think what qualify would be in 1985 when jim baker left as reagan s chief of staff,
can a president, you know, even try? can a president even attempt cutting off his own son-in-law? a man married to his daughter, once we ve learned that is the person of interest in the fbi s investigation? and while i think we can all appreciate this realtime, real life lesson in why we have those nepotism laws after all, is there anything else like this in our history? is there any precedent for this that can tell us what to expect as to what s going to happen next? joining us now is michael beschlos nbc news presidential histian o knows these things. michael, thank you for being with us, we appreciate it. my pleasure, rachel. so we have had presidential family members involved in governing before. we have. robert kennedy was attorney general, he was in the cabinet. but looking at presidents under investigation, looking at this particular twist of nepotism in
wake up, you look at your phone at 6:00 in the morning and you see a tweet from donald trump and you go, oh, my gosh, i can t believe he sent that out? have you suggested to him maybe to dial back the tweeting and when he is president, do you think he ll continue the way he has been tweeting since the campaign started? so donald trump s social media platforms are a powerful way for him to connect to people and sometimes what he tweets gets twisted into unrecognizable fashion. we have all experienced that. people take a snippet or a headline and really bastardize it and i know it s good for ratings but it doesn t help fulfill the duty we all have to perform america. do you think he takes criticism from snl. he doesn t answer every criticism. believe me, this man does not.
you have to think again about pulling the trigger and pretty good advice coming into this time. tom brokaw, thank you very much and michael beschlos, thank you. thank you, tom. hill stayed still ahead, maud bob woodward and frank bruni will join us. how capitol hill is preparing for president trump straight ahead. you re watching morning joe. we will be right back. are you gathering up the tears have you had enough of mine nner that goes on a wall. it s not something you do now and then. or when it s convenient. it s using state-of-the-art simulators to better prepare for any situation. it s giving offshore teams onshore support. and it s empowering anyone to stop a job
a showing. those are the ones that were, you know that were the big watch. when i came in and donald trump started to make some noise, it was like, put katy on him and it will be six weeks, probably. you could tell even from the beginning and i m kind of a broken record on this. the crowds really large and when he went after john mccain and that was not a big deal in the voters eyes, that to me signaled that this man was going to break rules and he was going to be able to break rules and continue to do so. he did. while it s surprising he was able to make it as far as he did and get to the white house and be the 45th president of the united states, the enthusiasm and excitement for him for something completely different and for someone that was going to blow things up was pretty apparent from the beginning. i almost forgot about the mccain moment but that was a signal of something very