US to send more troops to Middle East after Israeli strikes in Lebanon | The Excerpt
On Tuesday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Monday was the deadliest day in Lebanon since 1990 after Israeli strikes on Hezbollah targets. Paste BN White House Correspondent Joey Garrison takes a look at the different approaches to masculinity by the Trump and Harris campaigns. Vice President Kamala Harris leads former President Donald Trump in Michigan polling, but Trump leads in several other battleground states in a separate poll. President Joe Biden will defend his legacy and U.S. involvement in the world, in a farewell speech to the U.N. General Assembly Tuesday. Paste BN National Correspondent Elizabeth Weise has the latest from the Coast Guard Titan submersible hearings.
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 Tuesday, September 24th, 2024. This is the Excerpt. Today, what's next after a deadly day in Lebanon? Plus, how the Trump and Harris campaigns are approaching masculinity. And we have the latest from hearings over the Titan submersible disaster.
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The Pentagon announced yesterday that it's bolstering its forces in the Middle East as tensions between Israel and Hezbollah spike. The move, with an undisclosed number of troops, comes after Israeli strikes in Lebanon yesterday killed nearly 500 people according to Lebanese authorities. The new troop deployment was characterized as an insurance policy by a US official who was not authorized to speak publicly. The official said the move does not indicate US troops were needed for imminent combat. The Lebanese Health Ministry said yesterday was the deadliest day for Lebanon since the end of the country's civil war in 1990. Earlier today, Israel struck Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon and the Iran-backed Hezbollah attacked military facilities in Northern Israel. You can stay up on all the latest from the conflict with a link in today's show notes.
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With this year's election defined by a major gender gap, the Trump and Harris campaigns are leaning into different versions of masculinity. I spoke with Paste BN White House correspondent Joey Garrison to learn more. Hey there, Joey.
Joey Garrison:
Hey, Taylor.
Taylor Wilson:
So, Joey, I want to just start with this. How really is Donald Trump going after the young male vote in this election cycle?
Joey Garrison:
Yeah, so Donald Trump, their campaign has identified a voter 40 years or younger male voter, a large segment of them they believe are undecided in who sway towards him. This is often a voter who isn't totally plugged into politics all the time, kind of a low information voter, and they need to rely on this voter because if you look at the gender breakdown, there's a huge gender gap in this particular election. For example, a Paste BN, Suffolk University Pennsylvania poll that we put out last week, has Harris winning female voters by 17 points and Trump winning male voters by 12 points. To make up that gap, their campaign thinks they can get more of these male voters, and so he's doing a number of things to try to appeal to them. He's gone on several of these YouTube live stream shows by folks who are very popular with younger male voters. Adin Ross is one of them who's a highly popular 23-year-old YouTube personality. He's gone to UFC fights. He's planning to go this to the Georgia Alabama college football game. So various things like this, they're trying to court this particular voter.
Taylor Wilson:
Joey, is the Harris campaign making its own appeal to young male voters? How are they really approaching gender and masculinity in this election?
Joey Garrison:
Yeah, I mean, obviously with Kamala Harris, who would be the first woman president in the history of the United States, with the VP Pick several weeks ago now with Tim Walz, they're leaning into that kind of blue collar male figure. The way they presented him as a football coach, as a veteran of the National Guard, as a former teacher, these are ideas of a different version of what it means to be a man. With Doug Emhoff, another top male surrogate, obviously the husband of Kamala Harris, he's talked about, "A real man stands up for reproductive rights." Trump has always presented himself as kind of the macho guy who exudes strength and he talked to a lot of his supporters and that's how they see him, is that kind of figure. On the other side with Harris's pick, with her surrogates, Tim Walz and Doug Emhoff, they're putting forward a different idea of manliness.
Taylor Wilson:
Yeah. Joe, you mentioned this polling that really shows us Harris's success with women, relatively speaking, Trump's success with younger men, relatively speaking. Just in terms of the election math here, Joey, Harris trying to shift some of those numbers, Trump trying to shift them the other way. How important are these really to election success in a couple of months?
Joey Garrison:
Well, I mean, it's huge. Right now, Harris, in our poll, is leading a state, for example, like Pennsylvania. She's doing better among female voters than Trump is among male voters. So that's one way to look at it. Now, you talk to the Trump campaign, and by no means are they giving up the female voter. You can't win without a large share of female voters, and they point to Trump's strength when talking about the economy and concerns about the border. Those are two issues where he tends to fare better than Harris and those are issues they think are important to female voters. But you can't ignore the importance right now of the abortion issue, what that has done for Harris's campaign's appeal to women voters. Rewinding the clock a little bit, we have evidence that independent women voters in the 22 midterms help Democrats exceed expectations in that election. That's a major issue right now. There's resonating among a lot of women voters.
You had Harris last week in Georgia, pointing to the recent example of a 28-year-old pregnant woman who wasn't able to get the healthcare that she needed during a pregnancy as a result of confusion over that state's new abortion restrictions. And so that is why in the final weeks of this campaign and these final two months, you were going to see the Harris campaign, just knowing how much better they're doing with women voters, and how leaning into this message can solidify that further. They think that that could be the difference in a lot of these states right now. One thing to point out is there is an obvious risk in banking on a male vote, and that's that historically more women tend to vote in presidential elections than men. In the 2020 presidential election, for example, 82 million women voted. That's about 10 million more than the 73 million men voted. So you can't rely on just totally banking on a male vote to take you over the finish line. Trump still needs to make more inroads with women, something Harris right now is doing, in order for him to be elected again as president.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, Joey Garrison covers the White House for Paste BN. Thank you, Joey.
Joey Garrison:
Hey, thank you.
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Taylor Wilson:
Vice President Kamala Harris has a small lead over former President Donald Trump in the key battleground state of Michigan. That's according to an exclusive new Paste BN, Suffolk University poll. Harris leads Trump in Michigan by three points, 48% to 45%, the statewide poll found, with results within the poll's, 4.4% margin of error. Eight candidates will appear on the Michigan ballot, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who has suspended his campaign and endorsed Trump. Kennedy is supported by roughly 1% of those polled while five other candidates get less than 1%. Although those margins seem small, they could make a major difference in the national race according to David Paleologos, director of the Suffolk University Political Research Center.
Meanwhile, Trump leads Harris in three critical battleground states, Arizona, North Carolina, and Georgia according to a new poll by the New York Times and Siena College. In North Carolina, a state that has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 2008, Trump's lead is a narrow 49 to 47 margin, but in Arizona and Georgia, two states that narrowly went to President Joe Biden in the 2020 election. Trump is now leading Harris by a slightly higher margin, 50 to 45 in Arizona and 49 to 45 in Georgia. We're in for a tight next few weeks. You can read more with a link in today's show notes.
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President Joe Biden will look to strengthen his legacy on the global stage when he addresses the UN General Assembly today for the last time before he leaves office. With wars in Ukraine and Gaza unresolved, and his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, running neck and neck with his hand-picked successor, Vice President Kamala Harris, the address will be Biden's last chance to articulate his worldview before the November election. Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta told Paste BN that Biden will be, in Panetta's words, "Setting the agenda for the presidency of Kamala Harris." Biden's argument runs counter to the one that Trump has been making. The ex-Republican president insists that conflicts would not have broken out in the Middle East and Ukraine if voters had not given him the boot. He has pledged to prevent new foreign entanglements if he wins office again. Biden allies have pushed back on those claims. For instance, former Undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland said in an interview that Trump did nothing to rein in Russian President, Vladimir Putin, when he was in office. You can read more about Biden's address later today with a link in today's show notes.
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OceanGate's co-founder spoke to a Coast Guard hearing yesterday about his former company's tight and submersible disaster last year as questions remain surrounding the tragedy. I spoke with Paste BN, national correspondent Elizabeth Weise for more. Beth, how are you today?
Elizabeth Weise:
I am well. It's always fun to hear marine engineers talk about their craft.
Taylor Wilson:
It's always fun to hear from you as well, Beth. Unfortunately a tragic story here though. I am curious what we heard starting here, Beth, from OceanGate co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein. This was at a Coast Guard hearing yesterday. What did he say about this Titan submersible disaster
Elizabeth Weise:
That he didn't know why it happened, he had no idea. We may never know. He left the company years before the accident, though he was still a minority shareholder and he said that he kept in pretty close contact with Stockton Rush, who was his co-founder. But he said he didn't know what decisions were made and that those people shouldn't have died, but it may be impossible to ever know. Interestingly, he then gave an impassioned statement about he hopes that this will not stop people from doing deep sea explorations and scientific studies. And that's interesting because there have been five full days of hearings so far, and in the first four of them, a lot of former OceanGate staffers said, one, "We weren't doing anything scientific. This was just you got to spend a quarter of a million dollars and go down and look at the Titanic close up," and that there was a rather striking lack of concern about safety issues.
Taylor Wilson:
You mentioned OceanGate Co-founder, Stockton Rush. Where have these hearings landed in terms of, I guess, blame or consequences here, Beth, a little over a year after this tragedy?
Elizabeth Weise:
Well, seeing as he died in the implosion, he's out of it. I mean, there are multiple lawsuits that have been filed against the company, which doesn't really exist anymore. It has no employees. They've got lawyers and they've hired a crisis PR firm, but they don't actually have employees anymore. So the Coast Guard hearings that are being held, their remit is to figure out what happened, hopefully to keep it from happening again. It's not necessarily to assign blame, though. You could hear in Monday's testimony some of what they're thinking, which was quite fascinating. We've heard, over the course of multiple days of the hearings, that in Dive 80, which occurred in 2022, there was a loud bang as the Titan was being raised up to surface level. They showed acoustic recordings and you see the little line just goes crazy all the way to the top.
And on Monday, Phil Brooks, who was the former OceanGate engineering director, was testifying before the panel and he said, "We knew that. We heard the bang. We tried to do an inspection of the hull." It's really hard because basically there's a pressure hull on the inside and then there's an outer covering, and the only way they could really do anything was just take a flashlight and look at the small gap between the insert and the hull and try and figure out what had happened, but you couldn't actually see much. And remember, OceanGate was based in Everett, Washington near Seattle, which is where Boeing... There's a lot of amazing engineering knowledge in that part of the country. He said, the team was saying, "We need to bring the sub back to Everett, pull out the inserts and see if there are any cracks," especially after that loud bang because it means they were concerned.
He said that they were really frustrated that instead the submersible was left in Canada on the dock out to the elements. They had no way to look at it. They were told that it would be cost prohibitive to ship it back to Washington State. And so that's why they didn't do it. And then he said that he left the company around that time because he'd gotten really frustrated with some of these issues.
Taylor Wilson:
So Beth, we have a few days of hearings in the books here. What's next? And are these hearings the final chance really for answers about what happened last summer?
Elizabeth Weise:
There's still a couple of days of hearing left and then the US Coast Guard will issue some sort of a report and we don't know how long that will take. And it's been interesting hearing the questions they're asking, but they're all over the place, so it's really hard to know where that's going to go. Will it be the final say of what happened? There are still lawsuits and presumably some things will come out in court, though people are testifying and they're asking a lot of really in-depth technical questions. I mean, the panel is a bunch of marine engineers and Coast Guard people, so I don't know that it's going to be the final say, but it is probably the most comprehensive overview we're going to see.
Taylor Wilson:
All right, great roundup for us here as always. Elizabeth Weise is a national correspondent with Paste BN. Thank you, Beth.
Elizabeth Weise:
Thanks so much.
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Taylor Wilson:
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 and I'll be back tomorrow with more of The Excerpt from Paste BN.