Meet the Press NOW — April 4

If it's Thursday, President Biden delivers a warning to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu about the future of U.S. support, unless Israel takes immediate action to address the humanitarian crisis and the safety of Palestinian civilians and aid workers inside Gaza. Plus, the latest installment of NBC's Deciders' focus group giving us a revealing look at voters at voters from union households, as both Biden and Trump ramp up their pitches, to working-class voters who could decide this presidential election. And rescue crews in Taiwan in a race against the clock with hundreds of people still stranded trapped under the rubble following that devastating 7.4 magnitude earthquake, the most powerful quake the island has seen in a generation.

Welcome to Be The Press now, and Peter Alexander here in Washington, where President Biden is growing increasingly angry and frustrated, aid say, over how Israel is conducting its military operations in Gaza. And he's delivering a new warning today to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu after that fatal strike that killed seven world-central kitchen workers. Today, the president and the Israeli Prime Minister spoke by phone the first time they have done so since that deadly strike. President Biden emphasized that the strikes on the aid workers of the overall humanitarian situation in Gaza is unacceptable to U.S.

officials who are telling NBC News that the president strongly implied that the U.S. would withhold military aid if Israel does not make immediate changes, both the State Department and the White House spoke to reporters following the call. We may clear the need for Israel to announce and implement a series of specific concrete and measurable steps to address civilian harm, humanitarian suffering, and the safety of aid workers. He made clear that U.S.

policy with respect to Gaza will be determined by our assessment of Israel's immediate action on these steps, what we want to see are some real changes on the Israeli side. And you know, if we don't see changes from their side, they'll have to be changes from our side. Despite important steps that Israel has taken to allow assistance into Gaza, the results on the ground are woefully insufficient and unacceptable. If we don't see the changes that we need to see, they'll be changes in our own policy.

Secretary Blinken traveling overseas today, the clock is ticking according to the National Security Council, Advisor John Kirby, who told reporters that the administration expects to see changes from Israel in the coming hours and days when asked about a timeframe. Meanwhile, calls for an independent investigation into the Israeli strike on those aid workers that are certainly growing louder, including from Jose Andres himself, the founder of the World Central Kitchen. But this was not used bad luck and situation where, oops, we dropped the bomb in the wrong place or not. That's why we need to have an investigation that is neutral and is above IDF.

I believe we'll be putting tensions on anybody. They will tell the story. What they want to say. But what I know is that we were targeted deliberately, none has stopped until everybody was dead in this convoy.

For its part, Israel says it is conducting a quote, throw and transparent investigation, but it also signaled that that that investigation could take weeks. All of this follows a week of escalating frustrations and very tense White House meetings about the war. American officials tell NBC News that Ron Dermot, top advisor to Prime Minister Netanyahu, began yelling and waving his arms during what was a virtual meeting on Monday with top U.S. officials as Dermot was pressed about the viability of Israel's proposal to move more than a million civilians out of southern Gaza ahead of its planned offensive there.

Then in a separate incident, a Palestinian American doctor who treated patients in Gaza recently tells NBC News that he walked out of a meeting between the president, administration officials and Muslim American community members on Tuesday to signal to the White House how his community has felt abandoned by this administration. Additionally, according to an attendee in that meeting, President Biden revealed to Muslim community leaders some of the pressure that he is facing personally, including from First Lady Jill Biden, who he says has urged him to end the war telling her husband, quote, stop it, stop it now, Joe. And today, new pressure from the President's allies and Congress as Delaware Senator Chris Goons, a Biden campaign co-chair is now saying for the first time that he would support putting conditions on military aid to Israel. I think we're at that point.

I think we're at the point where President Biden has said, and I have said, and others have said, if Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister were to order the IDF into Rafa at scale, they were to drop that was in pound bombs and send in of Italian to go after Hamas and make no provision for civilians or for humanitarian aid that I would vote to condition aid to Israel. I've never said that before. I've never been here before. Joining me now is my colleague, Monica Alba.

She is outside the White House. Now, Monica, the White House has even I saw, says that Israel needs a change, its policy. So what specific actions and really what timeframe are they demanding right now? Well, Peter, this is sort of a conditioning of the conditioning.

This is the US laying out what it wants to see from Israel in the coming hours and days and then effectively telling them if Israel doesn't step up its protection of aid workers in Gaza, if it doesn't allow for more humanitarian aid to go into the Gaza Strip specifically from places like Jordan or perhaps to open up more border crossings, if those things don't happen in a concrete fashion, the US is effectively saying we will consider conditioning that military aid that has been so crucial to Israel's bombardment of Gaza. And that is a shift here just in terms of what we've been wondering about for weeks and months. If we would reach a point in this nearly six month war where the US would decide there could be a change in policy, there had certainly been some adjustments to rhetoric, outrage has continued to grow and spike, but it's different when we're now talking about this actual US policy that could shift and we aren't really talking about this Peter in the near term. They're saying they want to see this in the immediate.

And so I think this is something that the US doesn't want to preview an exact timeline, but they are being more clear, more blunt than they have been in the past that if they don't see a specific change from Israel on the humanitarian aid front, that then that is something that could be conditioned and we are told by US officials who were briefed on this call between the president and prime minister that the message that was conveyed very directly was all about this potential for a change in military aid, Peter. Monica, we haven't heard from President Biden publicly on this. He's released some statements we have heard from AIDS privately telling us that the president is angry. He's frustrated.

He's outraged right now. Some other questions is, will we hear from the public explaining the situation to the American people? There's new polling from NBC News. It's just how upset so many Americans, specifically young Americans, are with this situation.

But I want to ask you specifically about what it is that is driving the White House, the president's frustration, that anger, what are our sources telling us is really fueling all of this? And it's one thing to have this private anger and to have officials talking about behind the scenes, everybody is universally frustrated about this, but it's another to really translate that again into some action and into a shift. But what we understand behind the scenes, the reason and what is really fueling this is that the president has for months taken this approach of the way to try to influence Israel, perhaps to do what the U.S. wants, is to keep Israel close, to embrace Prime Minister Netanyahu, to really be sure that that consistent steadfast support does not change isn't altered.

That has been something the president has even said to some of his top aides that he feels proud of taking that position in that approach when he felt like his once running mate and his predecessor on the Democratic side, former President Obama, had taken different steps when it comes to Prime Minister Netanyahu and Israel. So this is really something where the president is the one who feels very driven by this approach, something he thinks he has enough foreign policy chops on, but that now clearly isn't working. And so there is this internal realization of that and then you have these incidents in the last week or two with the aid workers that just really crystallizes the need to potentially change that. Yeah.

Monica, I appreciate all your expert reporting today. Thank you so much and for more on this situation on the ground in Israel NBC News, international correspondent, Raf Sanchez, just filed this report for us from Tel Aviv. Israel's military says it is investigating the killing of those seven aid workers, but now World Central Kitchen says that's not enough. They want to see an independence investigation conducted by a third party.

They are calling on Israel to preserve evidence and they say there are a lot of unanswered questions. The list, how is it that Israeli forces open fire on that aid convoy with, remember, multiple airstrikes when those vehicles were clearly marked with a logo of the World Central Kitchen and when the aid group had coordinated their movements with the Israeli military ahead of time. Now, I had the opportunity earlier to speak to the parents of Jacob Flickinger. He is was a 33 year old US Canadian citizen.

He was a volunteer with World Central Kitchen. He was among the seven dead. His parents telling me they also don't have confidence in this Israeli probe. They want to hear an apology from the Israeli government.

They want to hear a whole lot more than that and they are also saying that they are just two people who are suffering right now, the searing grief that comes with the loss of their only son, but they point out that there are thousands and thousands and thousands of families who have lost somebody in Gaza. They are calling for a ceasefire. They want their son's work to continue to feed those people on the brink of famine right now. Now, a couple of hours before that Israeli airstrike in Gaza, they killed those aid workers.

It was an explosion at the Iranian embassy in Syria. Iran saying it was an Israeli attack that killed a number of senior officers with a revolutionary guard. And over the last day, Iranian leaders have been vowing revenge. Israel tonight is on high alert.

Its air defense systems are ready. The Israeli military has canceled leave for combat soldiers because they are bracing for possible retaliation. And Israeli officials tells me at this point, there is no concrete intelligence that indicates that an attack is imminent, but there is a lot of concern here. The Israeli military confirming that it is jamming GPS systems, which means that people's Google maps aren't working in some cases.

And this is a threat that's being taken seriously. Raph Sanchez, thank you for that reporting and joining me now is Ambassador Dennis Ross, former special assistant to President Obama for the Middle East region and an NBC News foreign affairs analyst. Ambassador Ross, I appreciate your being here on this day. U.S.

officials are telling NBC News that President Biden's message to the prime minister to Netanyahu included a warning that the U.S. would consider conditioning military aid unless Israel makes immediate changes to address humanitarian concerns in Gaza and unless Israel agrees to a ceasefire as soon as possible. I just want to get your reaction to that warning and how soon do you think Netanyahu really has to act to respond? Well, I think there's really two different issues here.

One is, I think the president is looking for some kind of clear demonstration that Israel is doing more, not just to facilitate humanitarian assistance going into Gaza, but actually I think more humanitarian assistance actually is going into Gaza. But I think what the president is looking for is much more direct Israeli action to ensure that there isn't chaos in this delivery, that there's security for the delivery, that if humanitarian assistance is going in, doing more to create an environment where those who need it are actually getting it. I think that's something that the administration and the president will be watching to see. Number one, number two, I think on the issue of the ceasefire, it's tied to an agreement with Hamas.

Now the problem is last week, Hamas rejected, right, proposals Bill Burns made, which he's raised and accepted. What it suggests to me is that within Israel, there has been a fair amount of reporting that the negotiators for Israel on the hostile deal haven't been given the mandate that they feel should have been given. Whether they're the ones letting that be known or others who know them are saying that not clear. But it is interesting to me that the president picked up on that because up until now, that's actually not been anything that we have suggested.

So that too indicates that this is an issue that the president is kind of attuned to on the one hand, but also is quite mindful that it's a domestic issue with Israel and it does. It's a different way to put pressure on Prime Minister Netanyahu. So that is an interesting point that you flagged her. Do you want to ask you specifically about this threat that aid, military aid, could be conditioned as a consequence?

Does that have teeth? I mean, Israel right now does not need any more new American aid. I recognize it would be symbolic, but would that actually have any real impact? Well, as it relates to Gaza, probably not.

But Israel right now has canceled leave of all of their military because they're on a high alert in anticipation of some kind of an attack by Iran as a result of even though Israel didn't admit it, they were the ones who took out maybe the most important religious regard leaders since Qasem Sulemani in their attack in Damascus a couple of days ago. And it's clear Iran is saying there's going to be Israel's going to pay a price for this. So the fact that you could see some kind of expansion of conflict either coming out of Lebanon and Hezbollah or something that's triggered by the Iranians or some of its proxies, maybe with barrage attacks from Iraq or Syria, that gets you into a situation where if Israel is fighting a wider war, even beyond what we've seen now, then some kind of hold of American military assistance would be an issue. Right.

Although I'm patient to add, President was pretty clear in the statement released by the White House that when it comes to threats from Iran, United States is going to be there with Israel. Let me ask if I can. We talk about this being a tense back and forth between these two men, obviously in some ways they have really competing interests here. Do you get the sense that the Prime Minister of Netanyahu has really been trying to just see how far he can push the US in recent weeks about the limits of its support?

What is Netanyahu's calculation right now? I think the calculation is driven more by his own domestic needs. He has a coalition where the people on the right who are the ones who he has the greatest concern about possibly leaving the government and therefore bringing it down, they're the ones who are insisting less responsiveness to us, even tougher approach in Gaza, going into Rafa now, don't waiting on it. And I think what he's been doing is he's been posturing himself towards them.

I would just flag for one key indicator that Israel really didn't intend to go into Rafa anytime soon anyway. Yeah. They read all along that they had to evacuate Palestinians who were crammed into the Rafa area. They were trying to send a message to Hamas as opposed to a kind of public posture.

You would have seen that evacuation begin. That would have been an indicator that we're preparing for an attack. There hasn't been an evacuation that's begun yet. So that's why I see this as much more public posturing towards his own domestic needs and the needs of his coalition and probably the attitudes of the public more generally, given what they're being Hamas remains.

But I think unless sort of posturing towards President Biden, although it has that consequence. I was going to say, and just to be clear, Mr. Ambassador, part of the tension that existed in a call earlier this week between the White House and Israeli leaders was over this issue of how the Israelis proposed dealing with Rafa 1.4 million Palestinians there and the Israelis were proposing basically making the move in a matter of days or weeks, which the US said was simply not feasible. It wasn't doable.

I want to ask you quickly about the growing calls right now. Even members of the war cabinet are calling for some early elections. Benny Gantz wants to see them held in September. That news coming out within the last 24 hours or so.

Netanyahu says elections during a war could paralyze the country. Could new elections in Israel restore trust in the government? Is there any possibility that happens and how big of a different speaker could that be in the circumstance? If you look at the polls in Israel, 70% of the Israeli public do not trust this government.

So that's a pretty clear indicator of why the Prime Minister probably doesn't want early elections. Number one. And number two, I would say Benny Gantz on his own kind of bring the government down. But there is this issue with the draft of the ultra-religious and subsidies for them have been cut off.

Yeah. It does. It does. And it may be that what you see Gantz doing is making this call because this may be part of the maneuvering with the ultra-religious to see would they support this in return for some kind of interim measures to preserve subsidies for their issue with students.

Yeah. A lot of maneuvering going on. You know, watching Israeli politics for lots of years, I would say don't assume anything just yet. I'm not betting just yet that we're going to have elections, but remember, but I wouldn't be surprised either.

This has been a hugely consequential and challenging time on all sides of Bassard Dennis Ross. We appreciate your expertise and your perspective. Thanks for making time for us. My pleasure.

Still come right here with shake up in the presidential race, sort of, no labels coming up with no candidates ending the group's open fielding a candidate who would appeal to the voters who are not happy with either Biden or Trump. There's also some breaking news on the Trump legal front as judges in Florida and Georgia today rejected his efforts to dismiss both of those cases. It's all ahead. You're watching.

Welcome back. As we noted, we are watching some breaking news right now out of the former president's criminal case tied to his mishandling of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago property, the federal judge presiding over his case there in Florida has denied his motion to dismiss the charges, effectively rejecting his argument that the documents were personal under the Presidential Records Act. The judge here is Aline Isilin Cannon, a Trump appointee who has raised eyebrows with some Trump-friendly rulings in this case to this point. She said that the charges that he wanted dismissed make no reference to the Presidential Records Act.

This really, however, does leave open the possibility that Mr. Trump could use the Presidential Records Act later on in this case. Separately, the judge presiding over Mr. Trump's election interference case in Georgia today rejected his bid to dismiss those charges on free speech grounds.

At the same time, we've gotten several stark reminders in recent days that former president Trump is able to withstand sometimes even a benefit from controversies that would be politically fatal for almost any other politician while campaigning in Michigan this week. Mr. Trump claimed that he spoke to the family of Ruby Garcia. She is the 25-year-old woman who was allegedly killed by her undocumented immigrant boyfriend.

Her family told NBC News if he lived in Michigan, that that is simply not true. Garcia's sister said, quote, he did not speak with any of us. So it's kind of shocking seeing that he had said he had spoken with us, misinforming people on live TV. The Trump campaign for its part has declined to comment.

Here's another example. The former president has repeatedly defended people who are in free trial detention for their actions during the January 6th attack. He calls them hostages. He said they're patriots.

But an investigation by my NBC News colleague Ryan Riley found that many of those currently being held are accused of assaulting law enforcement at the Capitol. The number of people being held is dramatically less than Mr. Trump makes it seem. Right now, 15 January 6th defendants are in what they call pre-trial detention at the border of federal judges.

That is out of more than 1,300 charged in connection to the attack. Those reporters are joining us now on set NBC's Garrett Hakey covers the Trump campaign for us, as you surely know by now, NBC News Justice reporter Ryan Riley, he wrote that January 6th story as well. Garrett, let's start with you. We'll start with the Ruby Garcia example here.

You just imagine if anybody, the president who I cover on a day-to-day basis said that they had spoken to somebody and sort of shared that personal account without having ever reached out to that individual what the sort of pushback, the backlash, would be. But for this president who in effect has found himself to be tafflon too often on these things, he's just trying to drive right through it. What is the reaction that you're hearing? What are they saying?

Now, getting very quiet on this issue, as you pointed out, they had no specific comment when we asked them about why the former president had said he had this meeting, we had a source within the campaign who didn't want to be on the record basis, we said, we don't talk about these meetings unless the family wants us to talk about them. In this case, the family was pretty clear this meeting didn't even happen, so I think there's a couple things going on here. First, Donald Trump has gotten very comfortable in the space of using these personal tragedies for his political benefit, as he did with Lincoln Riley's family in Georgia. There, you had something of a split.

He did meet with some family members, some afterwards described themselves as uncomfortable with it. What I think we're also seeing here is something, Peter, you probably remember from the White House days in which Donald Trump tends to kind of fabricate conversations in a general sense, to serve conversations. I was just talking to someone very powerfully said to me, sir, you've got to do this, right? He blows through specific details of things that actually happen quite often in the service of a narrative that he wants to put out.

Here he got caught doing so, and we'll see how long the sort of tail is for him on this one. And the bottom line here is this is all about his effort to focus on migrant crime, trying to blame Joe Biden. That's right. Whereas the Biden campaign is so heavily focused on the issue of reproductive rights, that's sort of the big backdrop on this.

Ryan, let me ask you. I want to talk about your story here. Trump praises these defendants as unbelievable patriots, I'm making sure I get the language right. He has played the national anthem as sung by some of those patriots as he described it.

That's how he's begun some of these rallies in recent weeks, the defendants still awaiting trial that have some pretty heavy charges here. So give us a sense of what they are facing and why the accusation that their hostages is so wrong. Yeah. I mean, so people convicted of crime obviously aren't hostages.

That's sort of ridiculous. We have a judicial system where these people go through. They have their case held, either before a judge or heard before a jury of 12 people of their peers who get together and review the evidence. And I should point out that even here in DC where there's been these claims that, oh, juries in DC can't handle these cases clearly, they have acquitted January 6th defendants, even up to the oathkeepers of certain charges.

So they're looking at the actual evidence, they're applying the evidence and the facts and figuring out what the right determination is from here and that's going to be an anonymous decision from those those trees here. But what I really focused on here was pre-trial detainees and there's only 15 of them as you said of those more than 1300. Yeah. So it's a very narrow window.

That's really gone down from another 60 at some point a couple of years ago. But as these cases have worked their way through the system, as more people have pleaded guilty, as more people have been convicted of trial, it's really only a narrow subset of these defendants were being held pre-trial without being convicted, including in that group or someone who fired off a gun allegedly, I have a capital two gun shots in the air, covered from multiple angles, not really a question about their identity here. There's another individual who actually threw an explosive device inside the tunnel where some of the most violent scenes of the day took place where all these officers were pack ins and the officers talked about how they temporarily lost their hearings and had ringing in their ears for days, even lost their hearing for a few hours afterwards. And then there's another individual, Edward Kelly, he's actually the fourth individual who goes inside the Capitol.

And he's someone who bust opened that door, even after that, even after that evidence, he was allowed free. Several months later, he was re-arrested. Why? Because the FBI says he was plotting with a friend of his to kill the FBI agents who were investigating him.

His friend in that case has already pleaded guilty and did it, that they conspired together. Edward Kelly himself was talking about potentially a plea deal and now it seems like that case also might go to trial, separate it apart from the underlying crime of January. Well, by the way, if you're listening to us, this is a lot to keep track of Ryan wrote all about this. It's at NBC News.com and Ryan Riley.

It's easy to find. I want to tell you on this topic. I reached out to one of the families of the American, Israeli-American hostages being held right now in Gaza. I'd ask them for their reaction when former president speaks about this and they were sharply critical about the language when he describes these individuals as hostages.

They said, among other things, they said basically that this was just outrageous, that this wasn't true. And they said it's excruciatingly painful. It's not the same as being kidnapped, dragged across the border and taken into a tunnel beneath Gaza where you're held for months in the dark. It's not just inaccurate and painful.

It is cruel right now. So does the Trump campaign have anything? Does the president have anything to say to his argument? They really try to avoid specifics.

I think that's something that we can really try to do as reporters or something. I'm going to try to do on the hills here. Because no one ever wants to touch these individual cases. They like talking about this as though there's a bunch of grannies held next to career criminals and some supermax somewhere.

And that's just not the reality of the situation. Individuals, the sentences that have been handed out to individuals, I think, are probably what a lot of Americans would probably agree was about the right sentence for these individuals when they're ultimately sentenced. And the people who individually have been held behind bars are there because a judge individually decided on their case that they need to be held because they are either a threat to the public or there's a worry that they're going to fleece. Several of these individuals have fled already.

Three of them were to compound in Florida, another National Guards in New Jersey. They put on a man hunt for 48 hours because he fled when they showed up. Yeah, I know how you keep up with all these different names. It was a heck of a read to get through.

We were reminded of the John McCain moment during the first go around with former president. Trump, or he attacked him saying he's not a real hero. I like heroes who don't get caught, so to speak. Didn't face any condemnation for that.

We did, but it certainly didn't stick in that occasion. It just seems like, you know, this is a challenge to all of us who do this right in the way that we framed this up. But also when he's speaking to his base here, the challenges, can he get that to a wider audience? Can he grow this sort of campaign of frustration and angst and agreement to a wider audience?

Look, I'm not convinced he's going to try. I mean, there's nothing in the way that Donald Trump has run his campaign that suggests to me that they are throwing their arms open to bring more people in. I mean, I think that that's what you would see a traditional pivot, right? They're used to seeing after a primary.

All of a sudden you change your tone, you change your tactics a little bit, you try to invite folks from the broader middle into your campaign. That's not what Donald Trump is doing. I don't expect to see him change. I think what you're going to continue to see is the same kind of dark and divisive rhetoric that he has used that does motivate his core base and to just keep hammering away at President Biden.

This is, I think, the Trump campaign's mind more of a race to the bottom than it is to somehow suddenly drop all this and invite people back in who've been tuned out because of this grossness. We basically know Donald Trump has a ceiling. The question is, can Joe Biden reach that ceiling and go beyond it? That is a lot of what we're going to be covering for the course of the next many months, and we'll have this conversation again.

Ryan Garrett, nice to see both of you in person. Thank you. Next, Democrats are becoming increasingly alarmed at Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy Jr.'s strength in the polls, and we've got new NBC News reporting on Democrats mobilizing what they described as sort of a major effort to try to thwart his third-party presidential bid. We'll get into that.

You're watching the press now. Welcome back, President Biden and former President Trump. We'll have one less opponent to worry about in November. That's because no labels now says that it is ending its 2024 effort because they have no candidate.

The bipartisan group says it was not able to identify candidates with a credible path to winning the White House to run on a third-party ticket. That announcement today, it could ease some Democrats' concerns about a potential centrist spoiler candidate, but there are other third-party candidates on the ballot, and NBC News has new reporting on why Democrats are, quote, freaking out about one candidate in particular. You could likely guess, RFK Jr., NBC News senior digital politics reporter Alex Seitzwald broke that story, and he is joining us now. For a lot of Democrats, I think it's like a hooray moment, right?

The no labels ticket is not going to be on the ballot, but RFK Jr., right now, has really been the threat that Democrats have been so heavily focused on, even mobilizing efforts to try to deal with him. Right now, why do they think he is a bigger threat to Joe Biden than he is to Donald Trump? Yeah, I mean, it's the history of just in my lifetime, Democrats have lost two presidencies they think because of left-wing spoiler candidates, Ralph Nader in 2000 and Jill Stein in 2016. This election is going to be so close, Democrats think that if even a small fraction of voters, one-two percent in some key swing states go for RFK instead of for Joe Biden, they think that could be the decisive thing that puts Donald Trump over the top.

They're especially concerned after he rolled out his vice presidential pick, Nicole Shanahan, not only because she's going to potentially bring a lot of money to the ticket that they need to get on the ballot. The former wife of Google founder, Sergey Brin. Very importantly, yes, but also because the way they talk about it, they're positioning themselves more to the left. She's a former Democratic donor.

He's obviously a former Democrat. They're saying, hey, if you're an ex Democrat, if you're dissatisfied with the Democratic Party, come join us the waters more. So what does that mobilization look like? What is this effort?

I mean, I've been hearing about a campaign and been directed to contacts to call about their efforts. What are they specifically doing? Yeah, there's a lot going on. There are super PACs plural that have been started just to combat third parties.

The DNC has its own operation. They have mobile billboards going around Kennedy events to kind of troll him. There's big legal efforts going on to try to keep Kennedy off the ballot wherever possible. And this is a totally different approach from how they've handled third-party candidates in the past, which was basically just to ignore them, pretend they don't exist.

So now they are loading the hopper with millions of dollars to potentially pummel them if they need to. Alex, I'm on the real challenges as I try to report this out as well, right? Is this why Democrats think that someone who is eyeing RFK Jr. right now would come around and vote for Joe Biden, or I mean, presumably these are people who were more inclined to vote for Biden in the past, right?

And now if they're not going to vote for Joe Biden this time, would they just pick another third-party person or sit it out altogether? I mean, in either case, they face a real challenge here. That's definitely one of the issues. And one voter that we spoke to who is at the RFK VP event said that if she doesn't end up voting for RFK, she would likely vote Green Party instead.

So there's a kind of, you know, multi-dimensional chess that has to be going on here. But the main point they want to make is that a vote for anybody other than Joe Biden is a vote for Donald Trump, and isn't Donald Trump scary. You can't real act him. So that's going to be their number one message.

And the people that they're most concerned about these kind of marginally attached voters, they call them to Democratic Party, low-propensity voters, especially young men of color. Pay attention to there. That's where a lot of this game is going to be. I hear the same thing as I do the report.

It's always validating when someone else is supporting similar things here is something not too dissimilar. Alex, nice to see you. Thanks for reporting and for sharing it with us. President Biden, while he's getting on union support to help him win in some critical states, among them Michigan, the president already secured an endorsement from the United Auto Workers in January.

But that may not translate into union votes this November. From the latest installment of our series, we call it the Deciders Focus Group, produced in collaboration with Engages, Syracuse University, and SAG. We heard from Michigan voters who are either in unions or have family members in unions about how that may influence who they support this fall. Who say former President Trump's policies are pro-union?

None of you have ever held me with this. He's not pro-union, but you support him in the next election. Tell me why. Because I think he's pro-worker.

I think he knows how to get jobs out there. You know, this taxing the rich and everything. That's all great, except for the rich or the ones that provide the jobs. If you tax them too much, they're going to go to another country and there will be no jobs.

I agree with what Deborah said. I think he's more about the workers. Workers. That's a whole not just the union.

What's your president Biden's policies are pro-union? Fine with you. For the last few years, I've watched our bargaining power become stronger. The right to work laws are starting to get repealed.

And our salaries are going up. He's starting to listen to us. I'm starting to feel like our voices are being heard and that we're not in danger of losing our jobs or even having unions getting dissolved. I just feel like he's publicly made his support of unions known.

He's not afraid to support us in the open. NBC News, White House, Washington, correspondent, you may shout out to the White House on occasion. It's nice to see you at least in person today. That was kind of remarkable to hear those words from these individuals, union families, union members and their reaction there.

Why did they say that their sort of union connection may not actually play a role in their choice? Well, it's a good question because you have president Biden calling himself over and over again the most pro-union president in history. You also have former president Trump courting unions. But what we learned from this focus group was that they're not a cohesive voting block, mainly because they're worried about a number of other things, like abortion or the economy or housing.

So they don't see the union as defining thing that's going to make them vote for one candidate over the other. The other thing that was really interesting is that there's really a political divide between the union leadership and the rank and file. And they said in a number of cases that when they looked at their union leaders they thought they were motivated by money or by politics. They were at times complaining about the fact that they only at most of the time they backed Democrats and you had some Trump supporters saying my union leaders don't really want to talk about the candidate that I want to support.

So it was very interesting to see. But really they just don't see unions as the number one thing on their list. Well, the biggest takeaway from what you said is that these are not monoliths. These union voters, union family members, voters here.

These guys were in Michigan, these men and women with whom they spoke recently. But the issue that was key to them had nothing to do with what's going on in Michigan in terms of union issues. It had to do with the border, a big national issue right now. That's right.

When you look at this group, 15 people, seven of them said they were voting for president Biden, six for former president Trump. Two said that if it was a two-way race, they wouldn't vote. But on the issue of the border, they were cohesive. So people were literally yelling at each other last night at this focus group.

When it came to the border, they all got together. So take a listen to what they said. Who's concerned about the situation at America's southern border? Joe Fingers, who's concerned about the situation in America's southern border?

Six of you. Kylie, what concerns you? We need to think about us first. We're at odds with our own country.

We need to be focusing on our own people. Not letting in people that are not in part of this country. They're getting so security and benefits that I can't even get even being an employed person in this country. And it just makes me angry.

And I never used to go that way. I was straight liberal as liberal as you could get years ago. But the more I see the more in my eyes are opening, it just makes me sick. You all live in Michigan.

You're more than a thousand miles from the southern Texas border. Why is that border such a big issue for you? It is taxing the resources of the entire country. It doesn't matter what state you're in, in my opinion.

It's a huge strain financially on all the resources that we have. It affects. The drugs are still getting to Michigan. The crime is still coming to Michigan.

I mean, a thousand miles is nothing to these kind of criminals. They travel wherever. They're well organized and they're well funded. There's a lot to break down from all of this.

First of all, most fentanyl goes through border crossings as opposed to between those border crossings. But those are really revealing views that a lot of these folks have about this issue. Including the first lady who said she's very liberal. Presumably a Democrat said on this issue she has real concerns right now.

I want to ask you quickly. President, his argument is, hey, there's a bipartisan border deal. This is the most Mitch McConnell was on board with this thing. Even the border unions supported this.

And they endorsed Donald Trump. Does it, does any of that resonate with these individuals? It really goes by their partisan view of the world. So if you're a supporter of President Biden, you see him really trying to do something on the border.

But if you're someone who's supporting former President Trump, you see him as being weak on the border. Even with that border security package. I want to just double score. Really underscore the fact that two of the men in that it was Larry and Paul, they were just really arguing all night long.

I watched this for three hours last night. They were arguing with each other. When it came to the border, they literally just started saying the exact same things echoing each other's languages. Talking about the fact that Democrats and Republicans, they need to get together and fix the border issue.

And it was really telling that they said in Michigan, they're like, yes, we're a thousand miles away from the border. But the fentanyl, the crime, all of that comes to the state. So really, really telling. Three hours of watching focus groups.

It's a big Wednesday night for the Alcindor family last night. You're a good sport listening to it. But they have some really revealing things to share. You mean, thank you for sharing that.

And after the break, rescue efforts are still underway in Taiwan, after the island's biggest earthquake. In 25 years, it left more than a thousand people injured. At least 10 are believed dead. You're watching me the press now.

Welcome back. We are still monitoring the developments in Taiwan where rescue teams are working to find hundreds of people still trapped after Wednesday's powerful 7.4 magnitude earthquake. And the news correspondent, Janice Mackey Freier, is on the ground inside Taiwan. This is Twalian.

You can see the building behind me is tilting very precariously. That's the force with which the earthquake struck here. And this was the hardest hit area. We're about 11 miles from the epicenter.

And the numbers continue to rise. More than a thousand people have been injured. And hundreds are said to be trapped. Emergency crews and helicopters were able to reach dozens of mine workers who have been trapped in two quarries.

The focus for search and rescue efforts is in the mountain areas around here. It's where hundreds of people have been cut off. Landslides are blocking roads. They're caught between the rockfalls.

People are stuck in tunnels. There are dozens who are at a hotel in a national park. Rescue teams have been able to get food and water to them. Some medical care if necessary.

But it will be a slow process to try to get those people out to safety. Landslides are blocking most major routes. There is debris and falling rock. A dash cam video today said it all.

It showed boulders rolling down the road and crushing cars. The other challenge for rescue teams right now after shocks. There's been more than 300 of them since the initial earthquake. And now weather is becoming a factor with rain coming into the forecast.

Here in the city, officials are taking a hard look at any buildings that have been significantly damaged. The one behind us will be demolished tomorrow as they continue to clean up and move ahead from this most powerful quake in a quarter century. Janice Becky Freire there in Taiwan for us. Thank you.

We're going to be right back with more of the press now. Welcome back. We're going to overhaul how the state doles out its electoral votes seems to have flamed out pretty darn quickly. Nebraska legislators last night blocked this Trump-backed effort to shift the state to a winner-take-all electoral vote system that likely would have benefited the former president.

While it is possible that supporters take another stab at trying to advance this proposal, it's unclear whether the proposal has enough support or time to become law. Joining me now to talk about all of it is Idris Calloon. He is the Washington Bureau Chief for the Economist. Maria Theresa Kumar, the President and CEO of Oto Latino.

She is also an NBC News contributor. And Sarah Chamberlain is with us. She is the President and CEO of the Republican Main Street Partnership. It's nice to see you in person.

We haven't done one of these conversations. We've been with you here. It looks like it's less likely now than it may have been that there's going to be any change in Nebraska. The reason this matters for those who are watching is if you live in the Omaha area that's a more blue part of the state, and that one vote could be the difference between a 270-268 electoral college victory for one of the candidates or 269-269 coming up here.

What is your reaction to what we saw in Nebraska? It's a big win for Joe Biden. You know, that single vote that he gets from Nebraska too probably will get again is really helpful for him because if he ties, there's a weird part of the Constitution where the House becomes even more gerry-mandered than normal. Every state has a single vote and the block as a whole votes.

Basically, if you look at the math, Republicans are going to be the majority of that. For that weird reason, this Nebraska vote going in this way is good for Joe Biden. It avoids a tie and a tie up for him. Among the other reasons why this got a lot of eyeballs right is because there are two states that do this.

Nebraska and Maine. Maine would benefit Joe Biden. So Donald Trump has no issue with what's going on in Maine right now. He's not going to win that state in any form.

In Nebraska, he has the potential to win an extra electoral seat that could actually vote the good matter here. That is always pretty striking for anybody trying to get an understanding of what the calculation is. Yeah, Donald Trump is just always in favor of things and self-interest. Surprising for a lot of existence.

I'm also in Nebraska as a company. I work in a British company. I've spent time in the UK. People always pay attention to our politics.

It's always shocking that people in London come up to you and ask you about Nebraska too. But people actually, it's worldwide now. The world is concerned. Well, our politics have become a sport for a lot of the world right now.

It's some real concerns about the way things are going. I want to ask you about this if I can for a little bit too soon, to get just your sense of the way things are going on in this issue and about Donald Trump broadly, calculation wise. Here, he's been saying, he's been talking about hostages. We were talking about earlier in this conversation, referring to these January 6th, assailants as hostages.

Only 15 of them were being held in pretrial detention out of like 1300, a lot of them because of some pretty serious charges, which is why that's the case. So what does this say about the party? There isn't any pushback within the Republican party about this kind of language that even a member of the hostage family told me today is cruel, it's painful, and it's inaccurate. It is, but it's working for his base.

And right now, it's all about Donald Trump's base. Most of the Republican mainstream partnership members are focused on that. So the calculation for him is just to try to get as much of the base as you can, not to grow it anywhere and try to knock Joe Biden down as low as he can and spread out some of his votes with third part. I think his strategy is all about turnout and making sure that the Trump base turns out.

And I think that's how he thinks he's going to win. I think he has a problem with suburban women. And he can't win them. And so if he can turn out more of the role people, he can drive up the numbers and hopefully get to victory.

I want to ask you about that really quickly. So you look at states like Florida, the White House, or the Biden campaign says it may be winnable now, states like Arizona, North Carolina will have reproductive rights, initiatives, language on their ballots. How does that change this conversation? I think Florida is a rich too far.

I just don't see Joe Biden really being able to play. But is the force Donald Trump to spend money there defending? It could. We'll have to wait and see how the polling goes.

But North Carolina has a little different. North Carolina has a lot of people from the North that have moved down there. And their governor, candidate, maybe will hurt Trump up to wait and see. He's very far right candidate.

Very far right. Let me ask you, Marie, I want to get back to the sort of predicate that we're here. This is the same Donald Trump that said he could walk on a Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and his supporters would still support him here. It does really, for a lot of Democrats, raise questions and concerns about what a Trump 2024 to 2028 White House might look like, right?

Those Republicans, a lot of Main Street Republicans will really work with them. The last time around, he has not, he has pushed all of them out. They're not even anywhere near his inner circle anymore. I think it's not just the Democrats that should be every single American who believes in our constitution and our former government and our rights that should be concerned.

He has already told us what he wants to accomplish when he's at the White House. And that is basically centralized power for himself. He has the memo. Maggie Everman put out exactly what he wanted to do.

The idea that he would like to be a dictator for day one. We should take everything he says absolutely seriously because he's demonstrated that he's willing to follow through. And if you want to look at his presidency, the first term, that was a dress rehearsal. He now understands how government works.

He understands the levers of power. And he is okay saying with the Main Street Republicans, I don't need you. And so there's no way to grow the base. I think that's been solidified.

But the Democrats need to do those. They need to figure out how to grow their base. All these polls that you see right now in North Carolina and Arizona and Nevada, what they're saying are the tens and hundreds of thousands of young people that have turned 18 since the last election that having jumped in. Will they jump in?

Will they rush? I want to ask you about that a little bit away because one of the key issues for that voting block as they were in particular is the issue with taking place in Israel and Gaza. Right now, there's new polling from NBC that just shows how furious, how upset that voting block is with the president, the president, US position vis-a-vis this issue right here. And interestingly, you then on this in particular, what's notable to me is that Donald Trump has basically been absent on this issue.

He said publicly, yeah, they should about Israel should finish the job. They're right. But he has sort of escaped accountability as it relates to Israel. I mean, there's no real understanding or conversation about what it would look like under a Trump presidency.

No, I mean, he's a candy politician and he avoids discussing not to Israel. He avoids discussing abortion. He doesn't also talk all that much about Ukraine. I mean, the people on the Republican side of that are people like J.D.

Vance and Tucker Carlson. He avoids these issues because he doesn't feel compelled to do it. And you understand why Joe Biden at the moment we saw him vent some frustration, a lot of frustration in Netanyahu today. But his base is split, right?

I mean, he has young people who are more progressively who are, you know, just appalled at the level of civilian casualties on Palestine at the same time. There are a lot of Democrats who are incredibly favorable towards the state of Israel and wanted to do well. And Biden is stuck between those people. Well, where there's agreement, I would suggest is that everybody wants this thing to end in the hostages to get home, right?

They want the Palestinians protected. They want the hostages to home. They want this thing to end in the president himself wants that perhaps as much as anybody because of the political calculations he has to worry about as well here. We'll ask you about something that the former president Donald Trump said just a couple of days ago.

He said, I'm going to make my position on abortion clear soon. As it relates to what's going on in Florida, the six week ban that's going to be on the ballot this fall, the Democrats would say you've made your position pretty clear on this. You've claimed credit for the three justices who helped overturn Roe v. What say you?

He has, but at the same time he's also gone to 15 or 16 weeks. I think that's where he's going to come down. So getting that he's going to come down there, so you were talking about women in the suburbs right now. Are women in the suburbs for whom this is a key issue?

It's been a big winner for Democrats across the board right now. Do they give the president, former president, any credit for anything else he says on this issue at this point? They are struggling with that. We do a lot of polling around this issue.

They're struggling, but if he can come in at 15 or 16 weeks, that's where the majority of the women are in this country. They can live with that, and then we'll see if they want to support Trump and other issues. But 15 or 16 weeks works. Right.

I don't think that's where he's going to land. Will it stick? Does it matter? It should matter.

Because once he gets into the White House, you don't actually know if he's actually going to follow through with that. But back to this notion about Donald Trump and Netanyahu. They've been close in the past. So that's one of the reasons why he doesn't want to physically talk about what he- But why don't we just jump in?

If Biden is dying out of this issue. No, no, no, no. But we have no way they will look like a few. Right.

We'll keep doing this in the commercial bank. I should put it on my phone and let people watch that. I appreciate you guys being here. It's nice to see you in person.

Sarah, I'm Richard. As well, let me see this news now. Coverage continues. Sally Jackson.

Right now. He was a young Marine. She didn't care about convention. They made a life together.

Then one night, the Marine died. And then the death investigation took a wild, unexpected, and utterly bizarre turn. I'm Josh Makers and this is Trace of Suspicion, an all-new podcast from Dateline. Listen to all episodes of Trace of Suspicion now, wherever you get your podcasts.