It's a tie: Biden 37%-Trump 37% in new USA TODAY / Suffolk poll | The Excerpt
On Monday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are tied in a new USA TODAY/Suffolk poll. USA TODAY Justice Correspondent Aysha Bagchi recaps pivotal testimony from Hope Hicks and looks ahead to a new week of Donald Trump's hush money trial. Israel calls on civilians to evacuate parts of Rafah, in southern Gaza. USA TODAY National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise talks about the double brood cicada phenomenon. It's Met Gala Monday.
Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it. This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.
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Taylor Wilson:
Good morning. I'm Taylor Wilson, and today is Monday, May 6th, 2024. This is The Excerpt. Today, a look at new polling surrounding Trump and Biden. Plus, we look ahead to this week's hush money trial testimony after we heard from Hope Hicks on Friday and the cicadas are here.
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Well, it's a tie. Six months before election day, president Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are tied at 37% apiece in an exclusive USA Today Suffolk University poll, but plenty of votes are up for grabs. 24% of registered voters say they might change their minds ahead of November's election, and 12% have not made a choice yet. Meanwhile, 8% are now supporting independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and an additional 5% are backing other third party contenders. Most of their supporters acknowledge they might switch their allegiances before casting a ballot. The new poll shows Biden closing a gap on Trump in recent months, though within the survey's margin of error, in the USA Today Suffolk poll taken in January, Biden trailed Trump by three points, and in March he trailed by two. Now they're even. Biden since January has also gained ground among some key voters while Trump lost it, including among voters under 35. Among Hispanic voters, Biden's support has stayed the same, but Trump has lost 11 points. You can read more with the link in today's show notes.
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Another week of former president Donald Trump's New York hush money trial will see a new witness take the stand. Last week, a lawyer who represented former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, testified about his efforts to get her story of an affair with Trump into the hands of the national Enquirer during the 2016 presidential campaign. But the week's most pivotal testimony came Friday when former top Trump aide Hope Hicks broke down crying on the stand. I caught up with USA Today Justice Department Correspondent Aysha Bagchi for more on that and a look ahead at what to expect this week.
Hello, Aysha.
Aysha Bagchi:
Hey Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
So Aysha, we heard Friday from former top Trump aide, Hope Hicks, who took the stand. Can you remind us who Hope Hicks is and what did we hear from her testimony?
Aysha Bagchi:
Hope Hicks is someone who has a long history with the Trump family. She worked for Ivanka Trump once upon a time, and then she went on to work for the Trump organization and she became his campaign press secretary during the 2016 presidential campaign. She went on to become his communications director in the White House. So she was involved when the Trump campaign had to deal with scandals that were coming out like the Access Hollywood tape, like alleged hush money deals involving allegations of affairs with Donald Trump. So she had a lot of testimony about some pretty salacious things that have happened in Trump's history.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah, so what did we hear specifically in this testimony?
Aysha Bagchi:
One huge thing we heard was basically the fallout from the 2016 Trump campaign after the Access Hollywood tape got released. We saw an email that Hope Hicks sent after she received an email from a reporter from the Washington Post saying they had this tape and did the Trump campaign have any comment? And the Washington Post reporter sent a transcript of the tape, so she got to read what the reporter said, the tape showed. What we really saw was how the Trump campaign reacted when they first learned about it. And you can see Hope Hicks sent an email very quickly afterwards about how to respond. And in the email she kind of listed out a two-step process. One was to figure out if this was legitimate, and number two was "Deny, deny, deny."
And there's a big reason why it's relevant to the prosecution's case. They want to argue that the hush money deals that happened with Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal, right before the 2016 election was happening, was related to the release of the Access Hollywood tape, that the Trump campaign was really concerned about Trump's status with women voters after that tape came out, and that gave Trump a motivation to make sure that the hush money was paid to keep the Stormy Daniels allegations quiet.
And Trump wants to argue that no, this had to do with something else, if I had anything to do with that payment at all, that it was really about protecting my family or some other reason... Because for the prosecution to prove that he committed felonies, they have to show not only that he falsified records having to do with that payment, but also that he did it to conceal another crime. And what they say is the other crime was a campaign finance violation through the hush money payment. But if he can show that no, the hush money payment was not about the campaign, then maybe he can get out of one of their arguments for why these are felonies.
Taylor Wilson:
And you talk about Trump, there have been questions over whether we'll hear Trump himself testify. What's the latest there?
Aysha Bagchi:
Yes, we saw an argument at the end of court on Friday about what the prosecution can ask Donald Trump if he testifies. That certainly seems to suggest that the defense is entertaining the idea that Donald Trump may testify, and then on Thursday, at the end of the day, he told reporters he wasn't going to testify and he mentioned the gag order as a reason that he's limited in what he can testify to. That is not true. And on Friday morning the judge made that clear. He said that there may be a misunderstanding about the gag order. It only applies to statements outside of court. You have an absolute right to testify and the gag order doesn't limit your testimony in any way. So it seems like it's still up in the air that he may testify.
Taylor Wilson:
So Aysha, the trial starts back up today. What can we expect this week?
Aysha Bagchi:
Hope Hicks sent in her testimony on Friday, but the prosecution doesn't have to disclose who they're going to call next. Hope Hicks's was the biggest name to testify so far, so that might be an indication that other big names are coming. We know that porn star, Stormy Daniels, could testify. We know that former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, might testify. We know that Michael Cohen is a potential witness and he's been a huge subject in the trial so far. Judge Juan Merchan has already held Trump in criminal contempt for what he deemed were nine violations of his gag order, but prosecutors have brought up four more and the judge still has to issue a decision on that. The judge did warn Trump last time that future violations could mean incarceration, jail time.
Taylor Wilson:
Aysha Bagchi covers the Justice Department for USA Today. Thank you Aysha.
Aysha Bagchi:
Thanks Taylor.
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Taylor Wilson:
Israel has called on civilians to evacuate parts of Rafah today in southern Gaza. Three Israeli soldiers were killed and a rocket attack claimed by the Hamas armed wing and at least 19 Palestinians were killed by Israeli fire yesterday. Israel's military said 10 projectiles were launched from Rafah towards the area of the crossing, which it said was now closed to aid trucks going into the coastal enclave. Other crossings remained open. Hamas's armed wing said it fired rockets at an Israeli army base by the crossing and its media quoted a source close to the group saying "The commercial crossing was not the target," according to Reuters. Meanwhile, Arab media giant Al Jazeera said yesterday that it would pursue every legal step to continue operations in Israel, hours after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet voted to shut down the Qatar-based global outlet's offices in Israel until the war in Gaza ends.
Netanyahu, who has long accused Al Jazeera of bias toward Hamas, said the cabinet determined the outlet was a threat to national security. Stateside, University of Southern California officials closed their main campus and brought in police to tear down an encampment yesterday as pro-Palestinian protests continue to sweep across the nation's universities and law enforcement is increasingly called in to disband the demonstrations.
As we talked about on the show last month, a double brood of cicadas is emerging this spring and the rare event has already been spotted in parts of the south and Midwest. I spoke with USA Today National Correspondent, Elizabeth Weiss, about why scientists are greeting the phenomenon with a mix of awe, curiosity, and humor. Hello, Beth.
Elizabeth Weiss:
Hey, how's it going?
Taylor Wilson:
Good, good. Thanks for hopping on The Excerpt today. So Beth, what's coming this spring, already here in some places, when it comes to this massive emergence of cicadas?
Elizabeth Weiss:
You'll only get to see them if you live east of the Great Plains states. And we've got brood 13 and brood 14, we are talking up to a trillion insects that are going to dig their way out of the ground, fly around for a while, make a whole lot of noise, mate, and then die.
Taylor Wilson:
Why do they emerge from underground in this way and what decides when they pop out?
Elizabeth Weiss:
First off, they spend a long time, 13 or sometimes 17 years underground in this nymph form where they basically suck from the roots of trees and they go through their maturation process. And then, only when the temperature of the soil reaches 64 degrees do they come up. And the only thing they're there for is to mate. And that's where it gets really noisy because all the males start singing, trying to attract females .
Taylor Wilson:
And Beth, how rare is it for these different cicada broods to overlap? And also, will they interact or reproduce with one another?
Elizabeth Weiss:
Oh, boy. There's a lot of grad students who are hoping to write their PhD theses on that, let me tell you. They're called periodic cicadas. They usually don't overlap. These two broods have not overlapped for 221 years. So the last time was 1803. The overlap of where these broods are is really small. It's just a couple of counties in Illinois, so there's not going to be a lot of opportunity to interbreed. Typically in the wild, they don't. You can force them to do it in the lab, but in nature they mostly don't because actually the males sing it a slightly different pitch, and if I'm a 17-year cicada female, maybe I don't like the 13-year Cicada males song. I don't know.
Taylor Wilson:
When it comes to cicadas relationship with humans, are we hurting them? Can they hurt us? What should folks know here?
Elizabeth Weiss:
Oh, they totally can't hurt us. One guy I talked to, he's actually the Smithsonian and he's like, they're just kind of goofy. I mean, they come out, they don't fly that well, they don't eat anything that we care about. They won't eat your garden, they won't eat your flowers. They will nibble a little at trees, but normally speaking, they're not going to hurt anything in your yard. They're not toxic. They're not poisonous. Your dog can eat them, your cats can eat them. So there is nothing about a cicada that can hurt you. But boy, are there things about humans that can hurt cicadas. Imagine being a scientist and you do an experiment and you know that the results of that experiment will not be available for 17 years.
So like one guy, he was in an area and he looked, okay, here's where the cicadas are coming up, and they only, only come up under trees because they're down under the trees taking nourishment off of the roots. And so he looked to where all they were coming up, and then he watched that space for 17 years. The trees all got cut down and they put down a parking lot. Well, cicadas can do a lot of things, but they cannot dig their way through cement. So he came back 17 years later and no cicadas were able to come up. That whole area of cicadas was just gone. So when we go in and clear cut a forest, when we create a parking lot, when anything that humans do that takes away their natural environment, we do cut into where they can live.
Taylor Wilson:
Elizabeth Weiss, National Correspondent for USA Today. Thank you Beth.
Elizabeth Weiss:
As always, happy to be here.
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Taylor Wilson:
It's Met Gala Monday, formerly called "The Costume Institute Benefit," the event is a fundraiser for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York city's Costume Institute. Last year, the event raised a record more than $22 million, according to Vogue Business, and it's a huge night for fashion. It often brings experimental looks, like Zendaya waving goodbye to her Disney roots in a Cinderella ball gown or Kim Kardashian in Marilyn Monroe's iconic 'Happy birthday, Mr. President' dress. Stay with usatoday.com for pictures and more from tonight's event.
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And today is National Nurses Day celebrating a critical part of the medical profession. Thank you to nurses Everywhere. And thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Taylor Wilson, back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from USA Today.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Biden 37% - Trump 37% in new USA TODAY / Suffolk poll | The Excerpt
