The Excerpt podcast: Joe Biden, Donald Trump secure delegates for presidential nominations

On Wednesday's episode of The Excerpt podcast: Former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden have secured enough delegates to win their respective presidential nominations. USA TODAY Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page breaks down new polling data ahead of a Trump-Biden rematch. The U.S. sends more aid to Ukraine. The Uvalde police chief resigns. USA TODAY Investigative Reporter Kenny Jacoby looks at how an NCAA rule gives athletes a pass on sex crimes committed as minors.

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 Wednesday, March 13th, 2024. This is The Excerpt.

Today, Trump and Biden secure enough delegates for their respective nominations. Plus, we take a look at new polling around the two candidates, and the US will send more money to Ukraine.

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For the third time, former President Donald Trump has earned enough delegates to win the Republican presidential nomination. That comes after wins yesterday in Mississippi, Georgia, Washington state, and Hawaii. He will not officially become the nominee until the Republican National Convention delegates vote this summer. With no debate appearances, Trump steamrolled over more than a dozen GOP competitors. His victory comes after the Republican National Committee laid off more than 60 people this week. Last Friday, Trump installed allies, including his daughter-in-law, to RNC leadership positions.

Meanwhile, President Joe Biden clinched the Democratic presidential nomination yesterday after winning primaries in Georgia, Mississippi, Washington state, and the Northern Mariana Islands. He'll also have to wait until the summer to become the nominee.

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Former President Donald Trump has edged out President Joe Biden in an exclusive USA Today Suffolk University poll. But things are tight. I spoke with USA Today Washington bureau chief, Susan Page, for the latest. Susan, always good to hear from you.

Susan Page:

It's always good to be heard from.

Taylor Wilson:

So Susan, there's new polling out. What did we learn about this presumptive Trump, Biden rematch?

Susan Page:

This is really the starting gate. We now have two nominees, their nominations all but guaranteed by the outcome of Super Tuesday, and they're coming out of the gate really close. Donald Trump at 40%, Joe Biden at 38%, and an electorate that is still pretty fluid.

Taylor Wilson:

And on a major issue, the economy, how do voters feel about this right now?

Susan Page:

We've taken 10 USA Today Suffolk polls since Biden moved into the White House, and this one shows the rosiest view of the economy that he's had since he became president. So this is good news for Biden. We've seen, over the past year or so, people's view of the economy getting better. It is now better than it's ever been during his presidency. That's not rebounding to a lot of his benefit right at the moment, but the White House believes it will.

Taylor Wilson:

Biden held his State of the Union address last week, Susan, is that having any impact on the numbers we're seeing in polling?

Susan Page:

Not much impact. Most, about 56% of Americans, say they watched some or all of it. About a third of them said it made them think better of him, but almost 3 in 10 said it made them think worse of him. So I don't think the State of the Union had a big effect. The effect that we did see, in talking to respondents after we pulled them, was it did reassure some Democratic voters that Biden was up for a campaign, that he was vigorous, that his age wouldn't be the terrible problem that some people have been predicting.

Taylor Wilson:

And as for former President Trump, he has a busy legal calendar coming up to say the least. What impact are his legal issues having on voters?

Susan Page:

Some Democrats have been hopeful that a conviction, in any of these trials that former President Trump faces, would prompt a lot of his voters to take a second look at this race. That's not what we found in our poll. 84% of Trump voters say it won't matter if he gets convicted in the trial in New York or in a future trial. And among the fraction that said it would affect them, less than 1% of them said it would prompt them to switch to Biden. For most of them, they would either go to a third party candidate or they just wouldn't vote.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. And Susan, polling also touched on so-called "double haters", folks who dislike both Biden and Trump. What numbers did we see here?

Susan Page:

So it's 15% of the electorate, 25% support Trump, 18% Biden. And interestingly, 21% support Robert F. Kennedy Jr., more than are supporting Biden. So people think this is a key voter group because maybe you can convince them to hate the other guy more.

Taylor Wilson:

So Susan, we're talking in March. November, still feels a ways off, a few months away. What does polling tell us at this point about how many voters might change their minds between now and November?

Susan Page:

This was, I think, a little bit of a surprise and a reminder that we shouldn't be too sure. We know what's going to happen in November because 1 out of 4 voters said they might change their mind. They might switch from Biden, they might switch from Trump. They might drop their support for a third party candidate. So this is a race that is not settled, not by a long shot.

Taylor Wilson:

All right. Susan Page, USA Today Washington bureau chief. Thank you, Susan.

Susan Page:

Thank you.

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Taylor Wilson:

The White House yesterday announced a $300 million military aid package for Ukraine. The package will include ammunition, anti-aircraft missiles, and armor-piercing weapons, according to senior defense officials who were not authorized to speak publicly. The move comes as Russian forces make battlefield gains, and a much larger aid proposal, for ammunition and armor, remains stuck in Congress.

The White House and Pentagon have been warning that Ukraine's defenses are weakening under sustained Russian pressure. Since Russia invaded in February of 2022, the Pentagon has provided about $30 billion in military aid to Ukraine. The main way of providing aid has been through transferring billions worth of equipment and ammunition from existing Pentagon stocks. Congress has approved funding outside the normal defense department budget in supplemental spending to buy replacements. That supplemental money has run out, but lower than expected spending on replacement equipment has allowed the Pentagon to fund the $300 million package.

Meanwhile, the first humanitarian aid ship, using a new maritime corridor, departed Cyprus yesterday bound for Gaza. More than 2 million people there face an increasing threat of starvation, and reports of malnutrition-related deaths are rising, according to health officials and aid organizations. The ship is towing a barge with 200 tons of food collected by World Central Kitchen, a nonprofit founded by celebrity chef, Jose Andres. It carries the first shipment of aid, sent by sea to the territory, since the war began.

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The police chief in Uvalde, Texas resigned yesterday. The move comes less than a week after a city commission report absolved department leadership and responding officers of wrongdoing in the 2022 elementary school mass shooting in the city. Chief Daniel Rodriguez had led the department since 2018. He was out of town on vacation when a gunman killed 19 children and two adults, and state and local law enforcement officers waited more than an hour to confront the shooter.

In a news release, Rodriguez did not explain his decision to leave the post. The city commission report was conducted by former Austin Police Detective Jesse Prado. In his findings, he suggested that no individual officer was responsible for the delayed intervention during the shooting. The report instead identified broader faults in law enforcement communication, a lack of access to the school site, poor police equipment, and poor SWAT training.

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The case of a registered sex offender on a Wisconsin College swim team is raising questions about where universities should draw the line when it comes to sex crimes committed as minors. I spoke with USA Today investigative reporter, Kenny Jacoby, for more. Kenny, thanks for hopping on The Excerpt today.

Kenny Jacoby:

Thank you for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So Kenny, can you just start by telling us a bit about Annabelle Boudreau and her story?

Kenny Jacoby:

Yeah. Annabelle is an 18-year-old. She lives in Minnesota. She's planning to attend the University of Nebraska for college next year. Starting when she was 11 years old, she was sexually abused by her cousin. She ended up reporting the abuse to her parents a few years later, after it had been going on for about three years. And it prompted a juvenile court case in Minnesota where her cousin was the defendant. He was charged with three counts of criminal sexual conduct in the second degree, or actually four counts. He was convicted of three of them. As part of his sentence he was required to register as a sex offender, and Annabelle thought that this sentence would effectively end her cousin's college sports career. He is a swimmer at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. But just over a month after the sentence was issued, she saw that, not only was he still competing, but he had just been named Athlete of the Week by his school. At that point, she and her parents knew that something was wrong, that the school must not have been fully informed of what he had done to her.

Taylor Wilson:

Yeah. So at issue here, Kenny, really is this NCAA rule that requires schools to annually vet athletes for incidents of sexual or violent misconduct. What is this and what are its shortcomings as it pertains to juvenile cases?

Kenny Jacoby:

So the rule was adopted in 2022, '23, the academic year, by the NCAA's highest governing body. And there are about 1,100 schools across the NCAA. And this policy applies to all those schools. It essentially says that each school has to take reasonable steps to look into the backgrounds of both new and continuing athletes to see if they have any incidents of sexual or violent misconduct. But the NCAA took a really hands-off approach to enforcing this policy, where they allow each school to kind of come up with their own questionnaire forms that they give athletes. There's no centralized vetting process, and schools can define what reasonable steps mean.

So most schools, the only real step they take is they have athletes self-disclose these incidents in their past on a form that they devise. But the forms often ask these really narrowly worded questions. And most of the forms that we reviewed for our reporting did not include any question about juvenile conduct. The problem with that is that most college athletes are 18, 19, 20, 21 years old. And so really, the only venue for any criminal behavior that they would've engaged in early in adulthood would've been juvenile court. So to not require schools to ask about juvenile cases really ignores a lot of potential issues in their past.

Taylor Wilson:

Kenny, have we heard from schools or the NCAA itself on this issue?

Kenny Jacoby:

Yeah. So we did reach out to the schools mentioned in the story, and they've all had a similar response when they did learn of these cases for the first time, which was, in all of those instances, they allowed the athlete to continue playing. Some of them acknowledged that the athletes had not disclosed the incidents to them when they were recruited or when they first completed their forms. But they sort of gave the athletes an out because they said, "Well, they answered the forms truthfully, we just didn't ask the right question." You might think that after that they would update their forms to add those questions, but that's not something that they've done. These issues come up when a news outlet finds out about them and reports on them. But rarely, it seems, do the athlete's status on the teams change afterward.

Taylor Wilson:

Kenny, juvenile delinquency records usually don't prevent people from enrolling in school. Do advocates and victims feel sexual violence should be different? And really, functionally, what improvements do they want to current policy?

Kenny Jacoby:

Juvenile court, it has more of a focus on rehabilitation than the adult criminal justice system, which is more focused on retribution. We do give, as a society, more grace to juveniles who commit these sorts of offenses. But some of the experts we talk to say that it's one thing to allow the juvenile to go to school and get a job, but that college sports maybe deserves a little bit of a different treatment because of the way that these athletes are really celebrated and uplifted in our society.

To put an athlete on a pedestal like that, who has a past like this, to have them represent your institution, some experts say that cuts against efforts to reduce sexual violence on campus because it sends a message that the behavior is tolerated and that success on the field takes precedence over campus safety and the way that victims feel about what happened to them. People on different sides of the aisle see differently about this. Some say, "Well, it was a juvenile case, we'll give them a second chance." But I think the advocate community and the psychology communities are often very split on this issue.

Taylor Wilson:

Kenny Jacoby with some excellent investigative reporting and insight on this story. Thank you, Kenny.

Kenny Jacoby:

Thank you.

♦

Taylor Wilson:

And today is National Good Samaritan Day, a chance to recognize the kind and selfless actions around us every day and maybe just do something nice for someone else.

And be sure to stay tuned to The Excerpt later today when my co-host, Dana Taylor, speaks with freelance reporter, Steve Fisher, about how Mexican cartels are branching out into timeshares. You can find the episode right here on this feed beginning at 4:00 PM Eastern time.

Thanks for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your pods, 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: The Excerpt podcast: Joe Biden, Donald Trump secure presidential noms