we welcome evan thomas, editor at news week. his new book is first, sandra day o'connor, a portrait of the first woman supreme court justice. our discussion on that forth coming. the aforementioned john meachem and tim mcgraw, songs of america due out june 11th. it had been a couple of weeks since his last. you get to go first. let's talk about this. is this a thing. you are going to have to put a language warning on our president's speeches? fdr didn't talk like this. 41 didn't. obama didn't talk like this. >> yes, we are. to look now to the presidency for the kind of moral guidance that we had been used to looking for is a pointless exercise. hopefully this is a temporary passing thing. there is no doubt president trump is defining the presidency down. the presidency hasn't changed him, but we don't know if he has changed the presidency to any permanent effect. >> evan, same question. >> well, that is the question is that has he made it normal to be profane in the presidency? has he normalized degradation? i hope not. this cou

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. >>> evan thomas and jon meacham remain with us. will note both gentlemen, while still young men, are visa of news week, the only original "newsweek" and the only word i left out of evan's title of editor at large are former. both are widely published historians. as we noted, this is one of the odd weeks in the calender year when jon meacham doesn't have a new book out and evan does. and what a book it is. it is in my happened. it is called "first" sandra day o'connor, an intimate portrait of the first woman supreme court justice. evan, i've got to say i am enjoying every page of this. i'm up to let's call it pillowgate, something i prefer from contemporary history, which we won't explain, we'll force people to buy the book and figure out what pillowgate is. i have one question, could she be confirmed today? >> probably not. she's too moderate. she's too reasonable to use jon meacham's criteria. she was confirmed 99 to 0. you don't find that today. she was a person of the center. she valued that. she valued common sense and reason.

evan thomas. good morning. >> good morning. >> you had extraordinary access to the o'connor family.erks. what do you want us to know? >> she looks like a formidable middle age lady in those photos. she was actually lively and fun. she liked to dance. she liked dirty jokes. she had great human was a great leader because she knew how to listen. her body would get very still. she knew how to listen to you and dish it out. in a man's world, 12 years before ruth bader ginsburg, she grew up on a ranch that was a man's world. she learned how to fire a rifle before she was 10 and drive a truck before she was 10. very self-reliant, very tough. very great human intelligence. she knew how to deal with all of it. >> in reading your book, you're reminded is she the most consequential women in history to date? >> well, she affirmed affirmative action and abortion for years. conservatives thought when she got on the bench, those things are gone. and she preserved them, compromising, the key is, it's not that she was a liberal activist at all. she was a conservative. she was a republican conservati

also joining us, evan thomas.atest book is entitled "first sandra day o'connor, an intimate portrait of the first woman supreme court justice." we'll get to that in a moment. first, former congressman beto o'rourke's presidential campaign says it has raised a record breaking $6.1 million in the first 24 hours of him announcing his 2020 bid. the campaign said it received online donations from every state and territory in the u.s. and that it did not receive any money from pacs, corporations or special interest groups. the total o'rourke at the top of the fund-raising totals, topping bernie sanders, who raised almost $6 million in the first 24 hours of his campaign. so fund-raising on a certain level, joe, instead of taking it from those especially interests. >>that's big. to out fundraise bernie sanders. i know in today's democratic party it is truly offensive of telling a self-deprecating joke. >> he as traction. >> he does. bob costa, these numbers answer a lot of questions regarding fund-raising at least. i don'

and it was evan thomas, my friend who was editing that week who took it out.nce? because i tried to do that in your column the other second, remember? instead of that line, just "but, dot, dot, dot." >> or forever, dot, dot, dot. >> i did that, too, and you nixed it. >> yes, i did. >> i think that you can boldly split your infinitives whenever you feel like it. the way it was taught to me as to why it's such a sort of an odd and useless and pointless rule. >> yes. >> is that it was one of the many rules that were devised in the 19th century by extremely well-meaning, bossy grammarians who wanted to make everything in the english language very neat. and the comment was, yeah, this was somebody who probably would have preferred that we were all speaking latin. and he was trying to impose notions of structure that he was picking up from his tongues onto a language that didn't need them. >> however -- >> the bottom line -- >> however, dot, dot, dot, as mika would edit -- >> out of time swrrks so we're out of time, but i want to tell everybody who's watching, you c

evan followed him into politics and became governor and a senator. >>> investigators in southern california determined the cause of one the most destructive wildfires in history. the thomasire in ventura and santa barbara counties were parked by power lines coming into contact by high winds. the line the ignited dry brush and burned more than 44,000 square miles of land. >> the power lines were operated by southern california edison. in a statement, the power company questioned the findings. findings. >>> in oakland, there is word that there could be more delays in the trial for the deadly goess ship warehouse fire. the east bay times is recording that deputy district attorney david lim is leaving his job on april 5th just as trial proceedings are set to begin he plans to start his own real estate law practice. real estate selection will start the same week as lim's departure. the trial was supposed to start last summer but there has been a series of delays. both defendants face 38 counts of involuntary manslaughter, one for each person who died. >>> oakland police led a procession for victor mcelhaney after his body was brought him. he is the son of councilwoman lynette