obama is back. he's calling out trump by name. he's rallying the dems and wondering what has become of the republican party. all of it as the 11th hour gets underway on a friday night. good evening once again from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. day 596 of the trump administration may well be remembered as the day the previous president got in the game. >> the politics of division and resentment and paranoia has, unfortunately, found a home in the republican party. >> much more on barack obama's re-emergence a bit later on in this broadcast here tonight. first, the current president is escalating his effort to find and unmask the anonymous author of that explosive op-ed piece in the "new york times." today, unbothered bid what the president would do if that happened. donald trump suggested using his

justice department to do just that. >> do you think jeff sessions should be investigating who the author of the op-ed piece was? >> i would think so because it is national security. jeff should be investigating who the author of that piece was. i really believe it was national security. >> is there an action that should be taken against the "new york times"? >> we're going to see. i'm looking at that right now. i'm looking. >> you said last night that it's treason, what happened. in this country, we punish treason with the death penalty. are you serious about that? >> we're going to take a look at what he had, what he gave, what he's talking about, also where he is right now. >> as you can probably tell already, the president spoke on board air force one, recorded in audio form and not by cameras, while traveling from montana to north dakota. >> do you want your people to

take lie detecter tests about this op-ed? >> people have suggested it. rand paul, who i like and respect, came out this morning. he said, have them take lie detecter tests. >> the "new york times" responded today with a statement that reads, quote, we are confident that the department of justice understands that the first amendment protects all american citizens, and that it would not participate in such a blatant abuse of government power. the president's threats both underscore why we must safeguard the identity of the writer of this op-ed and serve as a reminder of the importance of a free and independent press to american democracy. so far, nearly 30 administration officials, there they all are, from the vice president on down, have issued statements, saying some version of, it's not me. we heard from two of them today, including kellyanne conway. >> did you write the op-ed? >> no, i did not. everything i think i have the courage to say publicly. >> conway added the op-ed author should resign. the ambassador to the united nations, nikki haley, weighed in, writing her, it's not me to

the "washington post." she wrote, quote, i don't agree with the president on everything. when there is disagreement, there is a right way and a wrong way to address it. i pick up the phone and talk to him or meet with him in person. former president obama had plenty to say today about the current administration, including the criticism from opponents and the news media. >> it should not be democrat or republican. it shouldn't be a partisan issue to say that we do not pressure the attorney general or the fbi to use the criminal justice system to punish our political opponents. or to explicitly call on the attorney general to protect members of our own party from prosecution because an election happens to be coming up.

it shouldn't be democratic or republican to say that we don't threaten the freedom of the press. because they say things or publish stories we don't like. >> the current president is said to be still fuming, kind of in advance, over how he's portrayed in bob woodward's new book, "fear," which doesn't come out until next week. one of the juicier anecdotes reportedly involves former chief economic adviser gary cohn, going in and swiping a letter off trump's desk so he wouldn't see it or sign it. the letter would have ended a trade agreement between the u.s. and south korea. woodward shows the letter in his book. today, trump said, it is just not true. >> did gary cohn actually take a memo off your desk? is he a traitor? >> he never look -- he never took a memo off my desk. >> how did woodward get it? >> gary cohn, if he ever took a memo on my desk, i would have fired him in two seconds. >> let's bring in our lead-off panel on a friday night, at the

end of this long though oddly shortened week. brian, correspondent for "time" magazine, and jeremy bash is with us, as well. former chief of staff at the cia and pentagon. former counsel to the house intel committee. and anita, what is your latest reporting? we have to ask this hourly these days from inside this west wing. >> you've hit on it. the president is still very, very upset. people have used words that he's obsessed. he wants to know who wrote this. you know, there's all sorts of talk about finding out who this person is. i'm hearing they haven't launched any official investigation. even when the president, you know, sort of says jeff sessions should take this on, doj takes this on, he's not directed him to it. we've seen this before, right? he suggests lots of things but doesn't actually come right out and order it. he still wants to know who it is.

he still is guessing who it is. he's still trying to come up with a short list of who it is. >> brian, we've been forced into this parsing of words, really in an unprecedented fashion. you hear the president right there say gary cohn never took a memo off my desk. letters are external use. memos are internal use. could be that, i suppose. when you hear the president say he trusts the people around him, in your view, after being around this west wing, should he? >> wishful thinking on the president's part, for him to say that. i think there's -- one thing about the president is when he populated the white house, he had to bring people in who he hadn't had long relationships with. a lot of those people are still in his cabinet and are still around. that's just a product of the president being an outsider and not having a deep bench of people and advisers when he came into the white house. there are still people who came from other worlds that the president doesn't know that well around him.

the fact this op-ed came out has set that in relief and made the president even more paranoid that some people who he doesn't have many year relationship with may be trying to undermine him. >> jeremy bash, what would be the problem with the president, after labeling it a national security issue, assigning the levers and machinery of government, in this case, his justice department, to go after, root out, discover, and probably go after an anonymous author from within his own ranks? >> well, it is completely inappropriate to use the apparatus of the government, the authorities and capabilities of the u.s. government, to go try to squelch political dissent, political criticism. he'd be invoking national security in an authoritarian mode, to try to root out anybody who is a political critic. it is interesting, brian, because if you re-read that op-ed, it was all about the fact

that people in the government are simply ignoring the president and basically doing their job and ignoring when he directs them to do outlandish things. we saw this at the pentagon when he directed them to build 30,000 nuclear weapons. the pentagon said, we're not going to do it. in the woodward book, when the president said, assassinate assad, people said, we're not going to do it. i think nobody is going to lift a finger to investigate this, as it would be manifestly inappropriate, illegal, and unconstitutional. >> anita, lest we go a week without talking about omarosa, she was on "hardball," talking about what she sees as the president's current state of mind. we'll listen and talk about it on the other side. >> this is triggering his worse fears. it is going to make him go around and hunt down this person in the white house, in the agencies, and it is not a good precedent. >> anita, the question i ask you on a near weekly basis, if you

take out the supreme court confirmation hearings as a separate entity, how did the trump agenda advance this week? convince me that inside the west wing it was anything but the hunt for this author of the piece. >> it was the bob woodward first and then the hunt for the author. >> right. >> this was the week of the supreme court nomination hearings. this is something that the white house feels very good about. they feel like they have the votes on. of course, there was a lot of attention paid to that. then, you know, at the capitol. but at the white house, there's one thing after another. i mean, the job numbers came out today, and you can argue who should take credit for them, but they were pretty good. didn't get a lot of attention. you played some of what the president said on air force one. he also complained that stories about the economy aren't getting the attention they deserve. you could argue that it is because there's one drama after another at the white house. you know, this is the time right now, right after labor day,

where he's really going to go into campaign mode. we've seen him on the road this week. we're going to see him on the road next week. he really wants to take that message, the republican message, the midterm message, to voters. he is having trouble sticking to what the message should be. >> brian, the old gray lady, as people are fond of calling the "new york times," has a fresh coat of paint, though we're begging them to put bylines back on page one. it strikes us all the time, this broadcast every night covers the journalism and the journalists of that day. all of you, if you're a journalist or a former u.s. attorney, you're guaranteed a spot on this broadcast. talk about, thus far, the role of journalists and journalism in this presidency. >> well, this white house has crystallized the mission. it is incredibly important to be accurate and fast in getting the news out. also to try to say in plain language what's happening.

when a presidency is going against norms and doing things that are unprecedented, to be able to describe that quickly and accurately, so people can get a clear picture of what's happening. we've been working hard to do that. it'll be really interesting to see over the next couple months, as the president goes out even more on the campaign trail, the white house right now seems to want to put him out to be his own spokesman, rather than doing daily briefings. they haven't done it for a long time. reporters are having fewer and fewer opportunities to get the white house on the record on questions they want to ask them about, and only able to get the president when he makes himself available in the oval office and listen to what he says at the rallies and things he goes to. >> jeremy bash, we often ask our guests, what will it take to move republicans off the dime? the question to you, what was your pivotal moment? has it already arrived? will you know it when it happens?

or is it, as it is for so many people, the kind of slow-moving, frog-boiling experiment, of rolling moments every day? >> well, when i talk to people inside the government, inside the intelligence community, inside the defense department, i sense a huge frustration. because their job, in many respects, is to support a policy process, and there is no policy process. there are no deputies meetings, principals meetings. there's no regular order in the way policy is made. i think the woodward book explains this. the anonymous author explains this, as well. the president makes up policies and fires them off and decides things at whim without the input of facts, information, expertise. we're getting a horrible result. the thing i worry about, coming to the midterms, many people inside the government who are trying to do a good job are going to leave. they'll say, we served two years and are going to leave with reputations in tact, if they can. it'll be hard to replace them.

then we'll really have a government without anybody to check the president of the united states. >> we're much obliged to the big three for starting us off on a friday night. anita, brian, and jeremy, thank you, all of you, for coming on with us again tonight. coming up for us, the sentence for george pop -- papadopoulos for lying to the feds. then 44 goes after 45. obama asks what has become of the gop? "the 11th hour" at the end of a shortened work week on a friday night just getting underway. like ever. they reveal in extremes and defy limitations. these pursuits may seem unnecessary. but the scariest thing i can imagine is a world where this, doesn't exist.

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george papadopoulos is the first former trump campaign aide to be sentenced in special

counsel mueller's investigation. the one-time adviser sentenced to 14 days in prison for lying to the fbi about his contacts with russia-linked individuals during the campaign. before today's sentencing, the president was trying to distance himself from papadopoulos. >> i don't know papadopoulos. i don't know him. i saw him sitting in one picture at a table with me. that's the only thing i know about him. >> that picture shows the adviser sitting with the then-candidate and his security team back in 2016. papadopoulos worked on the campaign for several months. the trump crowd, you'll remember, rather famously tried to diminish his role to that of coffee boy. it is clear now he was not. also today, a long-time friend of roger stone's appeared before a mueller grand jury in d.c. his name is randy credico. he is a radio personality, a stand-up comic, and a political candidate here in new york.

importantly, roger stone called him his back channel to wikileaks and assange. he was comforted by his dog for several hours today and has been subpoenaed to do the same before the senate intel committee. there is also new reporting from bloomberg. according to sources, former trump campaign chair paul manafort lawyers talked about a plea deal to avoid the upcoming trial. it is enough to qualify for a conversation with joyce vance, former u.s. attorney. in light of obama's re-emergence today, we can remind the audience, joyce's name was among the first five nominations president obama made. joyce, i want to take things out of order and begin with the last thing we said. it is an interesting time, isn't it, for manafort's lawyers to be talking about a deal now. do you believe it?

>> i do believe it. it makes sense to me because manafort has exposure in this second trial. it will also cost him a lot of money to move forward. if he's going to conclude a plea deal with prosecutors, now would be the time. what we don't know from this reporting is, does he just want to plead to the indictment and go home, go to prison, or does he want to plead and cooperate with the mueller investigation? that's the most interesting thing to look for here. >> now, let's talk about papadopoulos. 14 days. i think by anyone's standard is a light sentence. it also comes with a year of supervised release. does that -- can we glean anything from that? does it mean, perhaps, he was so helpful that this liberal decision is a reward? does it mean that it turns out he didn't have that much stuff? >> i think this is anything but a reward. white collar criminal sentencing in the federal system tends to

be very light. papadopoulos had no criminal history. under the sentencing guidelines, he fell into the lowest category, the zero to six-month range for custody. the fact that mueller's team asked for any custodial sentence at all, i read, as a signal that they were not happy with what they got from george papadopoulos. >> joyce, what about all that talk? admittedly, a lot was from rudy giuliani. when we got to the 60-day window of the midterms, though trump isn't on the ballot, mueller's office would go suspended, pencils down. we had grand jury testimony and a sentencing today, and we're now within the 60-day window. >> we are. i think we heard every former federal prosecutor who comments on this station push back against giuliani's characterization of the rule. doj has a policy that prosecutors should engage in

serious consideration and make every effort to not take steps that could influence an election. that doesn't mean prosecutors have to shut down and go dark. it means, for instance, you might forego announcing a new startling indictment close to an election. it doesn't mean you can't continue to work, go to grand jury, move forward with the previously scheduled trial. i think we'll see this work continue. >> we have a few seconds left. they've talked to everybody but roger stone's dog walker. do you still contend he has a lot to worry about? >> i think he does have a lot to worry about. the interesting question here is, is he mueller's end goal, or is he just another step on the way up the chain? >> always fantastic to have you. joyce vance, thank you so much for joining us on a friday night. coming up for us, for democrats secretly worried about these midterms, president obama might as well have ridden into today's speech on a horse. even if the current president said later he slept through it.

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it did not start with donald trump. he is a symptom, not the cause. he's just capitalizing on resentments that politicians have been fanning for years. a fear, an anger that's rooted in our past, but it is also born

out of the enormous upheavals that have taken place in your brief lifetimes. >> democrats have been saying they need him. the left has been saying they need to hear from him. so today, they did. within the 60-day window until the midterm elections, today, the last president reappeared and came out swinging in his attack of the current president and what we call the new normal. it happened during an hour-long speech at the university of illinois. >> i complain plenty about fox news. you never heard me threaten to shut them down. or call them enemies of the people. it shouldn't be democratic or republican to say we don't target certain groups of people based on what they look like or how they pray. we are americans. we're supposed to stand up to bullies. not follow them.

we're supposed to stand up to discrimination. and we're sure as heck supposed to stand up, clearly and unequivocally, to nazi sympathizers. how hard can that be, saying that nazis are bad? >> president obama also offered stinging criticism of what's become of the republican party. >> they're undermining our alliances, cozying up to russia. what happened to the republican party? its central organizing principle in foreign policy was the fight against communism and, now,

they're cozying up to the former head of the kgb. actively blocking legislation that would defend our elections from russian attack. what happened? >> on cue, president trump responded to obama's speech today during his own remarks in fargo. >> i'm sorry. i watched it, but i fell asleep. i found he's very good, very good for sleeping. >> with us tonight to talk about all of it, a senior adviser to the national republican senatorial committee. also happens to be research fellow at the hoover institute and former adviser to marco rubio and mitt romney, among others. our own national political reporter, jonathan, you go first. only because i want to ask you, based on your experience, he went after trump by name. were you surprised? >> i was a little surprised.

usually, former presidents aren't willing to give up the halo effect of being out of office to essentially risk their popularity, the memory of their presidency, by getting back into fights with the current president. it's deeply unusual. we live in unusual times. as you mentioned before, president obama has been getting a lot of pressure from his left to engage in this fight. i think it is important to remember that donald trump won the presidency by beating hillary clinton in a lot of counties and swing states that barack obama has won. he has better standing in a lot of those places than any other democrat right now. there's a lot of pressure on him to speak up. i think some of the things he said, look, as he put it, it shouldn't be that hard to say nazis are bad. i'll even take the brave step and say nazis are bad. i hope i don't get any blow back from people criticizing me, making an opinion there. i think we live in deeply unusual times. obviously, he wanted to stand up and say something. he'll be on the campaign trail.

it'll be interesting to see two presidents at the same time on the campaign trail. we haven't seen that in terms of the most recent president campaigning while the current one is. >> we should say something here, and that is, when 44 got elected, 43 did the usual classy president thing and said, i'm going to keep my silence and hang back and enjoy retirement. i'm quite certain that 44, in criticizing 45, it was not an easy decision for him. what else did you find notable today? >> it could not have been an easy decision because it was clearly not something -- it was a break with tradition. i thought the other thing that was interesting was how aggressively president obama tied what president trump has done to the republican party.

this is really an effort to aim squarely at some of these voters that are moderate republicans, maybe convincible independents. the theory being, those individuals are the ones who are going to swing the election in november. the challenge with the theory, of course, is midterm electorates traditionally have been base electorates. it is about getting out the republican base or the democratic base. this appeal really is something that, i think, will energize democrats, yes, but also republicans. again, the idea is they can get enough independent support, maybe they can win in the marginal districts. >> jonathan, obama could not make the difference for hillary clinton in 2016. we may well learn that there were other factors at work. obviously, a midterm is different. obviously, absence maybes the heart grow fonder, especially on the left. do you think it is a difference he can make, to lonnie's point, this time? >> i think lonnie makes a good point that, generally speaking, elections are base. but strategists are still aiming at the swing voters, particularly those loosely affiliated republicans or people who feel alienated from the party.

i think that's why you're seeing so much negativity, frankly, from both sides. you're seeing republicans dump opposition research, trying to disqualify democrats. what you're hearing from president obama, as lonnie pointed out, this was a partisan message, tying donald trump to the republicans. he's basically trying to get the same thing accomplished. >> lonnie, i want to read to you what lindsey graham said on twitter today about president obama. the more president barack obama speaks about the good old years of his presidency, the more likely president donald trump is to get re-elected. the best explanation of president trump's victory are the results of the obama presidency. this next one i couldn't help. from may of 2016. same guy. lindsey graham. if we nominate trump, we will get destroyed, and we will deserve it. i guess there, right there, is the problem for republican office holders in washington in microcosm.

>> look, the difference between then and now has a lot to do with donald trump's popularity with republican voters. i mean, if you look where donald trump is now, he's getting 87% to 90% of support from republican voters consistently. you take a state like north dakota, where the president just was, where he won in 2016 in huge numbers. he is going to have a huge positive impact on congressman cramer, who is the candidate in north dakota. that matters, a lot, to these guys who are sitting incumbent. the way they view president trump is largely through the lens of how the republican base electorate views the president. he is in a much more popular place now than he was during the campaign, when senator graham tweeted that original tweet about the president. >> is it fair to say that there are republican office holders, especially in the leadership, with a kind of blood on their hands, as we are discussing nazis in 2018? >> well, this is one of those things where i think republicans would do well to be absolutely crystal clear about things that have to be denounced. regardless of what anyone else

in the party is saying. there are always going to be elements in both parties that are going to say things that are ridiculous about a number of different issues. to be crystal clear, to denounce white nationalism, to denounce racism, that seems like a fairly simple thing, regardless of who you're going up against. >> to jonathan's point, let's go out on a limb and do that together. gentlemen, can't thank you enough. lonnie and jonathan, two of our returning veterans. coming up for us on a friday night, the star witness on the hill today was the star witness on the hill almost a half century ago. we will talk to someone who was there. more on that when we come back. you're headed down the highway

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called by democrats as something of an expert witness. dean, of course, was a huge witness in the watergate scandal, and a star witness during those televised hearings, with his wife, maureen, famously seated behind him. he helped bring down nixon after cooperating with prosecutors. he served four months in prison. today, dean offered this analysis specifically here on the topic of presidential powers, if judge kavanaugh is indeed confirmed to this court. >> if judge kavanaugh joins the court, it will be the most presidential powers friendly court in the modern era. judge kavanaugh has a very broad view of presidential powers. for example, he would have the congress immunize sitting presidents from both civil and criminal liability. under judge kavanaugh's recommendation, if a president shot somebody in cold blood on fifth avenue, that president could not be prosecuted while in office. >> as we've reported, judge

kavanaugh has dodged key questions that could come into play with respect to the mueller investigation. he wouldn't say, for instance, whether president trump has the right to pardon himself or whether a sitting president must be required to respond to a subpoena. well, with us this evening is someone who was there, we think, as a small child, when john dean became a household name. jill wine-banks, former assistant watergate counsel. many were sad to see senator john -- no relation -- kennedy, smeared john dean and compared him to a rat. it was an unfortunate moment. dean was already kind of willing to laugh it off. other than that, how did it strike you today, seeing john dean, of all people, testifying on the hill? >> well, i'm very used to that because john dean has done a lot

about watergate since the time. of course, was a critical witness in the watergate trial. he has been offering an ethics course for lawyers from the lessons that he learned during watergate. so it isn't surprising that he is an expert in what an out of control presidency looks like and what the dangers of having unlimited executive authority are and the need to have some oversight beyond the congressional acts of impeachment. >> your experience and your legal standing are the reasons we always like to have you on. i know you're asked this, given your experience, a lot, but what are the dots you connect, if any at all, between that time, that case, and what we're witnessing in a slow rolling basis every day now? >> i see so many comparisons, but one of the most obvious is, we can hear on tape president nixon committing crimes. we don't have to wait for secret

tape recordings here because we see, in public and on twitter, president trump doing the same thing. i see obstruction in plain sight in front of us, without having to wait for a subpoena of tapes. there is that similarity. we have the obstruction for sure. the underlying crime was never proved to be committed by richard nixon. it isn't necessary for him to have been impeached for an abuse of his powers. i think that's what we're seeing now, too, is an abuse of power. that's what we should act on. >> of course, you realize if kavanaugh gets confirmed, it will mean, in a sense, that all the republicans voting yes have found a way, in their own heads, to either disagree with all that you just laid out or ignore it. having said that, do you think kavanaugh gets through? >> unfortunately, in the politics of today, there is a good chance that he will get through. that doesn't mean i think he

should get through. i think that there is enough question about his having dissembled before the congress when he was confirmed for his current circuit court seat, and that he may have dissembled in this hearing, as well. we have evidence that he has said, i didn't have conversations, that we now know he did have. we know that his views are extreme. he's been criticized by his colleagues on his own court, from both the left and the right, for having ignored facts, for taking on issues that weren't raised by the parties but served his purpose in trying to reach a particular outcome. he has been criticized for ignoring precedent. i think that there's enough reasons to think that he is not a neutral arbiter of cases, that would be dangerous in the supreme court. without a supreme court to oversee everything that is

neutral and doesn't have a bias to act, i think we are in big trouble. i am hoping that justice will be done and that he will not become a justice. that is my fervent hope. i'm hoping that some republicans will see the truth of his characterizations of issues and will vote against him, and that it won't happen. >> one of our long-time contributors on the broadcast, jill wine-banks. have a good weekend. >> thank you. the president claims bob woodward's new book must be fiction. he says, the quotes inside don't sound like him. we're going to talk to a man who studies words for a living and has, as it would be the case, not a kind word for this not a kind word for this president, when we come back.in♪ ♪ he's your home and auto man ♪ big jim, he's got you covered ♪

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president, when we come back.>> speaking today on air force one where, again, audio recording was allowed but no cameras, the president took issue with the way he is portrayed as speaking in this new book out next week from bob woodward. >> the book that was written was fiction. i don't speak that way. i'm highly educated. and, always did well. always did well, no matter what i did. >> how this president talks can be something, as you can tell, he gets sensitive about. if he feels someone is calling him out on his intelligence or schooling. tonight, we had a visit to the studio by one of the smartest guys we know. he studies words and the way people say them for a living. we often ask him about how this president talks, other than a lot. here now, our guest, armed with a phd in linguistics from stanford. he's a professor at columbia university and a contributor to the "atlantic."

professor, welcome. is every day in this presidency a word festival in your line of work or groundhog day? >> i don't like to watch him. i don't like to listen to him. i like to read my news. it is bad enough just reading the sorts of things he says, written out, when i occasionally am forced to actually watch him do what he does. then i am ever struck by what a meat and potatoes approach he has to what most people would approach as statesmanlike. >> i think of you constantly because you're the only person in your line of work who i know, and your line of work comes up so often when we watch him. i was watching the president last night in billings, montana. it was his delivery around the subject, by the way, of potential impeachment of himself, that struck me. we'll play this and talk to the professor on the other side. >> they like to use the impeach word.

maxine waters. how do you impeach someone who is doing a good job? the economy is good. how do you do it? how do you do it? we will impeach him. he's doing a great job. our economy is good. how do you do it? we will impeach him. but he's doing a great job. it's so ridiculous, but we'll worry about that if it ever happens, but if it does happen, it's your fault because you didn't go out and vote. >> the man was a reality television entertainment star headquartered in this building for 14 years. if you look back at corporate monica, the carson shows, that's a set he's doing. that's a set piece.

that's borderline standup. >> what he's doing is he watched people on tv and technically he doesn't drink, he is your uncle sitting by the pool and he's just kind of running his mouth in a colorful way and enjoying the attention of his little nieces and the teenager from next door. but the problem with this is it shows something more general about him. this goes beyond language. i cannot think of a president in the grand succession we've had who has spent so little effort in trying to be something larger than that swimming pool budweiser basic. he never tries. so you think of, say, an aristocrat like franklin roosevelt who actually forges something like the new deal. he wasn't thinking about that when he was a kid. john f. kennedy, to tell the truth, there weren't a lot of things he had his mind on until he became president, and he was to do great things. lyndon b. johnson was someone

who was frankly a parochial undereducated bigoted texan and the great society comes from him. donald trump never does anything that stretches beyond exactly what he was when. and i have this on good authority. this is somebody who took a rather gentle child in his neighborhood when he was a teenager and hung that kid out the window by his feet and enjoyed watching him yell. i have it on good authority, believe me, as trump says. he's never gotten beyond being that little nose-picking jerk. he's just exactly what he was when he began. it strikes me that even after almost two years, he's never had the slightest impulse to grow. that's what you see in his oratory. he just gets up there and talks when any other president -- i'm sure zachary taylor tried to orate, and here we are. >> you just said "believe me." that's kind of one of his verbal tics. he does -- i'll use his method to make a point. he does repeat the same phraseology in a very short period of time, the likes of

which we've never seen before. he does have these fallbacks. we've all come to know them. i know people in my life who say oh my god, i'm talking like donald trump. when you hear yourself using an expression that may come up organically in your life, but it's one that he owns, it's now a linguistic problem for our country. >> this gets into some linguistics. we think of ourselves as using grammar and putting words in it. but there's a modern way of thinking of how language works. you've got your words. you've got things you do with them, like you put an e-d at the end to make it in the past. then you have your expressions like what are you doing here or believe me or goodness gracious or i'll be hornswaggled. it's really your big box full of words. it's just whose is bigger. it's interesting, when he uses those same expressions over and over again what it shows is he has a small vocabulary because all of those expressions are words as well. so a certain kind of person has a certain size and can pick and choose, as you get older, especially if you're a

relatively experienced person say in the public eye you have kind of a smorgasbord. you try to vary it. but the most inarticulate thing about him is that he uses such a limited vocabulary. and we're not only talking about the sort of salisbury steak meat and potatoes sorts of words. we mean in terms of his expressions. it often sounds like he's only got about 2 1/2. and it's because he doesn't strive to adorn his speech at all. there's no art in the man. you can't imagine him tapping his foot, reading a book, having a favorite song, and in the same way with speech, he just lets it all fall out of his mouth like he swallowed some marbles and decided to spit them out within day, by the pool, with the beer. >> wow. i know a closing quote when i hear one. if i could think like you and speak like you, i guess i would be teaching on the faculty at columbia. thank you so much for coming by. >> thank you, brian. >> and be honest, who watching at home really thought they would hear hornswoggled and salisbury steak in the same broadcast on the same night? coming up for us, something

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well, there it is from space. last thing before we go tonight and as much as we try to send you off into the good night and into the good weekend with something hopeful, we are duty-bound instead to tell the many millions of people all along the atlantic seaboard to keep a heads up for a big storm due to arrive next week. it is florence. it's the first major hurricane of the season. it is 1600 miles from anything not counting bermuda right now. so here are the so-called spaghetti strand models including its possible paths. that includes a late hook out to sea. let's hope.

for once on this threat work, this is not about republicans or democrats. the red lines are european forecast models. blue for american. and there's this, the current so-called cone of probability forecast from the national weather service tonight. that does not look good for our friends in north and south carolina right now. winds are expected to be up at 125 miles an hour when we wake up on tuesday. by then we'll know a lot more about where this is headed and how large an area needs to prepare along the lower 48. and a little context here, under the heading situational awareness, our friends over at axios report, quote, forecasters are warily eyeing as many as seven to nine tropical cyclones that may spin up in the atlantic

and pacific oceans in the next week. what could go wrong? be sure to have a good weekend, everybody. that is our broadcast on this friday night and for this week. thank you so very much for being here with us. good night from our nbc news headquarters here in new york. we're following a lot of news this hour, including president obama drawing a new line, taking on donald trump for the first time directly since leaving office. also friday night's report tonight here from bloomberg that the united states feds are probing campaign finance violations by trump orbit executives. but first other breaking news. tonight bob mueller scored another first, the first former trump campaign aide to get a jail sentence. now, this convicted felon is not as high level as paul manafort, the sentence not nearly as long as many people could face, but it's another step in the progress of this mueller probe. now, what you see is much to the