Prepping for the Presidential Debate

This episode discusses the strategies and preparations of President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump for the upcoming presidential debate.

1. President Biden's preparation is methodical and traditional, focusing on mock debates and strategic issue focus.
2. Trump's preparation involves rallying public support and vocalizing concerns about debate rules and engagement.
3. The debate format has been strategically altered to prevent chaos and ensure a focus on policy discussion.
4. The episode also delves into international relations, particularly the tension between the US and Israel regarding weapon shipments.
5. The implications of the debate's outcome on voter decisions, especially among younger voters and independents, are a significant focal point.

1: Debate Preparation

Overview of how Biden and Trump are preparing for the debate, highlighting their contrasting approaches and strategic focuses.

• Mary Alice Parks: "Yeah, a really different prep strategy."
• Ann Flaherty: "With new debate rules, there are new strategies here."

2: Strategic Changes in Debate Format

Discussion on the new debate rules designed to limit disruptions and focus more on direct policy discussion.

• Mary Alice Parks: "The microphones are, in theory only going to be turned on when it is a candidate's time to speak."

3: US-Israel Tensions

Exploration of the geopolitical tension between the US and Israel, including accusations from Netanyahu about the US withholding arms.

• Benjamin Netanyahu: "Closest advisors were against the idea of putting out this video."

1. Understand the issues: Before engaging in political discussions or debates, understand the core issues and the positions of different candidates.
2. Critical viewing: Watch debates critically, focusing on the substance of what is being said rather than the performance.
3. Stay informed on international affairs as they can significantly impact domestic politics.
4. Participate in discussions and forums to foster a more informed electorate.
5. Encourage balanced media consumption to avoid echo chambers, enhancing a comprehensive understanding of political landscapes.

The Biden and Trump campaigns prepare for the first presidential debate this week. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands by accusations that the U.S. is withholding weapons. And crowds line up for a home in San Francisco on the market with a discounted price, but there’s a catch.

People

Joe Biden, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu

Companies

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Content Warnings:

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Ann Flaherty
It'S Monday, June 24. We're days away from a presidential debate. Just hold the applause. We start here.

President Biden and former President Trump prepare to face off for the first time in four years.

Mary Alice Parks
The microphones are, in theory only going to be turned on when it is a candidate's time to speak.

Ann Flaherty
With new debate rules, there are new strategies here. We'll tell you how the candidates are preparing. Israel's prime minister accuses the US of withholding arms.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Closest advisors were against the idea of putting out this video.

Ann Flaherty
The US pushes back as Benjamin Netanyahu makes a political play. And how long are you willing to wait to buy a house? 30 years?

Unidentified Neighbor
I don't, I don't know what to make of it.

Ann Flaherty
A real estate listing that has everyone lining up with a catch.

From ABC News, this is start here. I'm Ann Flaherty.

Hey, Brad's out today, but I've got you covered. In the meantime, this week it happens. The first presidential debate of the election between current President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump. The two face off in a historic rematch in Georgia on Thursday. But the format is not going to be what you're used to. ABC's White House correspondent Mary Alice Parks is here with us today. Mary Ellis, let's start with what the two men are doing to prepare for the debate. Where are they and who is helping them?

Mary Alice Parks
Yeah, a really different prep strategy. We've seen former President Donald Trump out on the campaign trail the last few days. He was speaking to a room of kind of evangelical activists in DC before he had a rally in Philadelphia. At both locations, he sort of lamented sort of an anxiety around whether people were even gonna watch it, bashing the rules and the format, which, of course he agreed to. But he, you know, he was also kind of testing out line, should I.

Ann Flaherty
Be tough and nasty and just say you're the worst president in history, or should I be nice and calm and.

Mary Alice Parks
Let him speak so clearly, feeding off of his supporters to get ready for a Thursday's debate. Really different than President Biden. A much more traditional debate prep. He's been hunkered down at Camp David this weekend with his closest advisors, kind of senior members of the White House staff, as you can imagine, including his national security advisor, his former chief of staff. Ron Klain, we're told, is actually kind of leading the debate prep and that they're doing full 90 minutes mock debates, a little bit more of a studious approach from the president. But look, we saw the president's surrogates, including democratic senators, and a lot of President Biden's closest allies, hit the Sunday shows. They were out there kind of talking about what they thought the president would.

Democratic Senators
Do if Donald Trump is elected to the presidency. He and the extremist Republicans are coming after abortion, contraception, and IVF in every single state in this country.

Mary Alice Parks
It seems like the focus is really three big areas from the Biden team drawing a contrast on reproductive health, kind of placing blame for the overturning of Roe v. Wade at Trump's feet, and really hitting the sort of big economic issues.

Democratic Senators
Joe Biden is going to be Joe Biden, and that means he's going to draw the contrast. He'll be out there for working families.

Mary Alice Parks
We've heard over and over from Senator Elizabeth Warren to, again, campaign spokespeople, saying that they really want to draw contrast between Biden as someone that they see as working class and Trump as someone as they see sort of willing and pushing big tax cuts, especially for corporations and the ultra wealthy.

Ann Flaherty
So are there voters out there that are undecided on these two candidates? I mean, we know what they stand for. So what does each candidate have to accomplish here?

Mary Alice Parks
I actually think there are. I'm thinking a lot about how the Biden team often talks about voters under 26. A voter who's 25 years old today was 17 in 2016.

So while the rest of us feel like, oh, my goodness, it has been just eight years of Trump in the headlines and Biden in the headlines, kind of a continuation, almost, of the 2016 campaign. Don't people know these candidates so well? This is just a historic rematch. The Biden team has focused a lot on those voters under 26, 25 who they say they kind of missed that first traditional introduction to Trump.

Benjamin Netanyahu
If he were to win in November.

Mary Alice Parks
You can bet that he will repeal our bipartisan gun safety law, reopen gun show loopholes, and veto any new gun safety laws. And the Biden seems telling me that those, the voters, they think they can really reach on some of these policy issues, that if they really underscore the difference between Democrats and Republicans on climate change or guns or reproductive rights, they could win some of those young voters back. And it was interesting. Just this weekend, Republicans, too.

Benjamin Netanyahu
We need to reach out to Democrats and independents, people who haven't voted for conservatives maybe ever.

Mary Alice Parks
Lee Zeldin, a congressman from New York, he was saying that he really believes that there are independent voters who are still out there up for grabs. And he was saying that he thinks Trump would be served by remembering that and kind of keeping his tone in check. Of course, that's so much of what we remember from the debates in 2020.

Pro Plan Sport
It matters.

Ann Flaherty
And they've also said the opposite.

Pro Plan Sport
They've also said no serious person said the opposite.

Mary Alice Parks
We remember Trump interrupting every single time, interrupting Biden every single time he spoke, interrupting the moderators, kind of creating a really chaotic scene. And I think that the general sense, even from the Trump team, was that it was too much. It turned people off. And I think that they are planning or at least hoping for a little bit less of a cadet debate. And of course, the rules themselves, being different this time, in theory, will play to that.

Ann Flaherty
Well, let's talk about that. The rules are different this time. How is this debate going to look different?

Mary Alice Parks
Yeah, I mean, these were the conditions, the terms that the Biden team laid out. Two really big changes. No studio audience. Again, we've seen Trump in the past really play off the energy of a crowd leaning into applause lines, encouraging noise. It will be quieter, literally quieter in the room. It'll be really different to just see and hear moderators and the candidates, and then the microphones are, in theory, only going to be turned on when it is a candidate's time to speak. Now, it'll be very interesting to see how moderators actually do that. Of course, part of a debate is you want debate. So I don't know how cut and dry that will be, but it was a part of the Biden team saying they don't want this to just be a chaotic, messy shouting match.

Ann Flaherty
I mean, some of his advisors say that this might actually help him.

Mary Alice Parks
Right.

Ann Flaherty
Because they're not going to, he's not going to be able to turn this into a reality show. He's not going to be something that's more of entertainment than it is substantive policy, and that this could in some ways contain him. Right.

Mary Alice Parks
Yeah, exactly. Keep him a little bit in check and focus on the issues. I mean, both campaigns are saying that that will make all the difference, focusing on the issues, what their ideas are for the next four years.

Part of the real challenge, too, for President Biden, I think, is showing his stamina, his readiness. And actually, for both candidates, I should say, we know that age and sort of readiness for office has been on voters minds. And I think that that will be part of that kind of x factor that voters will be watching for.

Ann Flaherty
That's ABC's White House correspondent Mary Alice Parks. Mary Alice, thanks for joining us.

Mary Alice Parks
Thanks, Anne.

Ann Flaherty
Next up on start here, Netanyahu makes an explosive allegation after the break.

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Ann Flaherty
Last May, President Biden did something a us president hasn't done in decades. He blocked a shipment of weapons to Israel, including several hundred bombs that weigh some 2000 pounds each.

Joe Biden
We are currently reviewing some near term security assistance shipments in the context of the unfolding events in Rafael.

Ann Flaherty
Now, these are the kinds of bombs used to destroy bunkers and tunnels buried deep in the earth, but they can also level whole residential blocks. The rationale, Biden said, was to ensure the Israelis took a more measured approach. In Rafa.

Joe Biden
We think it's imperative that we do more to protect civilians in the battlespace, and that's the real issue.

Ann Flaherty
But then last week, Israel's prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accused the Biden administration of withholding more than just one shipment of bombs, an allegation us officials said simply wasnt true.

Benjamin Netanyahu
We generally do not know what hes talking about.

Pro Plan Sport
Perplexing to say the least. Certainly disappointing.

Ann Flaherty
The episode was one of several in recent months that put not just the US and Israel at odds, but Biden and Netanyahu in particular, two men both fighting for their political lives with two different visions of what should happen next in the war. To help us sort through this dispute, lets turn to ABCs Jordana Miller, whos based in Jerusalem. Jordana, I understand Netanyahu re upped his claim yesterday. What is he saying here?

Benjamin Netanyahu
That's right. He doubled down again and told his cabinet there was a dramatic decrease in the shipments of arms to Israel in the last four months.

He said that he had personal conversations with the president about getting through some of that bottleneck and nothing had worked. And so he decided to go public.

Joe Biden
The administration has been withholding weapons and ammunitions to Israel, Israel, America's closest ally, fighting for its life, fighting against Iran and our other common enemies.

Benjamin Netanyahu
That very kind of provocative and as you said, even what the White House calls inaccurate accusations that there was an intentional holding up of the arms during World War Two.

Joe Biden
Churchill told the United States, give us the tools, we'll do the job. And I say give us the tools and we'll finish the job a lot faster.

Benjamin Netanyahu
It's worth noting that Netanyahu's closest advisors were against the idea of putting out this video.

Ann Flaherty
Well, and this is a tough claim to fact check because the US is still providing some $3 billion a year in weapons to Israel and we've seen some very large contracts roll through here, albeit for weapons that won't be delivered until the future.

At the same time, the US could be slow walking some of these contracts without making that public. What do you think Netanyahu's calculation is here? Why is he publicly calling out Biden?

Benjamin Netanyahu
Right. I mean, the big question was why now? Right? And I think a lot of it has to do with what's happening in the northern border here in Israel, where fighting between Israel and Hezbollah has really, really intensified.

Ann Flaherty
Israel this weekend trading more attacks across its northern border with Iran backed Hezbollah.

Benjamin Netanyahu
And many people now fearing that an all out war may be the next stage.

Unidentified Israelis
There's people up north that can't go back to their homes. There are people down south that can't live in peace.

Mary Alice Parks
I never, ever thought I would come to this, to a time where I would not be sure that my children and grandchildren would be able to leave here.

Benjamin Netanyahu
And so here's Netanyahu. He's looking at what looks like a slower, a trickle of arms because perhaps the United States is not expediting arms the way they did in the very first few months of this war. And he might be getting nervous thinking, those heavy payload bombs, those 2000 pound bombs, there's 3500 of them. I may need them if war suddenly breaks out in the north. And so this might have been Netanyahu's way of trying to put the administration in a corner, make it public and force them in some way to unfreeze those bombs so that Israel gets them pretty soon, because we know that. And even now, the israeli prime minister said himself last night in his first interview to local journalists here that the operation in Rafa major combat is wrapping up. Maybe two weeks, maybe three weeks is the estimate. Then the attention is going to turn to the north.

Israel is going to move troops up there. They already have.

We've seen threats of war from both the leader of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, and from israeli leaders.

Pro Plan Sport
When we say that we will not let October 7 happen again on any one of our borders, we mean it.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Hezbollah says that, you know, they won't stop attacking Israel until there is a permanent ceasefire in the Gaza Strip. But maybe we'll see an opportunity once Israel pulls out of the cities, pulls back after the Rafa operation wraps up, we may have a window there for some diplomacy. And surprisingly, Benjamin Netanyahu said in this interview again last night that he believes there is a chance for diplomacy to work.

Ann Flaherty
And I know critics have accused him of delaying an end to the war because that would mean an investigation into his government's failures on October 7. And then that raises the likelihood of new elections for him.

What is the politics of all this? It's an election year in the US as well.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Absolutely. Netanyahu has been accused by his critics, and that group is growing, by the way, that Netanyahu's own political survival appears to be coming first in some of his decisions.

Unidentified Israelis
Their strategy is not what we want. We want a ceasefire. We want the hostages to come back. We want to live in peace.

Benjamin Netanyahu
And many people do believe that Netanyahu is delaying getting that ceasefire, getting the hostages out, because once Israel stops the war for, let's say, six weeks or eight weeks or ten weeks, that is a moment when people could recalibrate. His government could fall, some people could peel off and we could see new elections. And obviously a stop in the war would open the possibility for the end of Netanyahus government.

Ann Flaherty
I think it really raises this question why Biden hangs on to this big shipment of heavy bombs. And as you say, Rafa is winding down, is the fear that Israel is going to use those bombs in Lebanon and open up the second front and have things, the war widen. I mean, that does seem to be a major concern here, right?

Benjamin Netanyahu
I mean, you know, there were a lot of people here in Israel who thought, you know, this is a terrible time for Netanyahu to be picking a fight with Biden. Right. President Biden has been loyal and faithful in word and deed to Israel and looking forward.

If, God forbid, war breaks out in the north, this is going to be a war of an intensity and destruction that will make Gaza look like kids play.

Hezbollah has 100,000 precision guided missiles. There's a possibility Iran could come in. There are tens of thousands of militias and pro iranian and pro Hezbollah supporters waiting to jump on the battlefield. I mean, there will be destruction in central Israel. Even here in Jerusalem will come under a lot of fire. Right? So this is a war not to take lightly. And if it happens, Israel will need President Biden in the United States more than ever. So why, why go and pick this fight now?

Ann Flaherty
Yeah. All these big questions as the israeli defense minister is in Washington this week to meet with top officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon. Jordana Miller in Jerusalem, thanks so much.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Thanks so much.

Ann Flaherty
Okay. One more quick break. When we come back, it's all about location, location, location and a tenant for 30 years. Are you sold yet? One last thing is next.

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Ann Flaherty
And one last thing.

We've talked on this show before about the lack of affordable housing in the US. Brad did a whole series last year called priced out, where he reported on the struggles of younger buyers trying to catch a break. You occasionally on social media will see someone who just bought a house and you're like, well, how did they pull that off? And what are we doing wrong? Well, there are a few cities where that problem is bigger than San Francisco, where the median home price is about one and a half million dollars. That means half the homes that are sold there are actually even more expensive than that. And within San Francisco, there's one neighborhood called Russian Hill that's particularly coveted. It's near the water, lots of trendy bars and cafes nearby. And there's even those iconic San Fran cable cars going up and down Hyde street.

But a three bedroom unit there, well, that might cost you $3.5 million. So you can imagine what happened when one owner put their 1100 square foot three bedroom home for sale for just $488,000.

It all came as a big surprise.

Benjamin Netanyahu
To all of us here on the street.

Ann Flaherty
There was, of course, a catch. The new owner wouldn't be able to move in until the year 2053. Yep, that's almost 30 years from now. And it's because the current owner says they have an agreement with the tenant living there now that says they can stay that long and only pay about $417 a month rent, selling for $488,000.

Unidentified Neighbor
I don't know what to make of it.

Ann Flaherty
The listing also says the property has to be purchased as is, meaning whatever condition it might be in 30 years, that's the condition you're going to get.

Our ABC news station in San Francisco, Kgo said the listing agents declined to comment, but that at least one expert told them the deal might have involved some kind of estate planning. You know, where a person inherits property from their parents or grandparents and the deal was set up so that they could live there for life.

Benjamin Netanyahu
Like, I want to leave some security.

Mary Alice Parks
To this person so they don't have.

Ann Flaherty
To worry about where they're going to.

Pro Plan Sport
Live, and they do it that way.

Mary Alice Parks
I think they should have done it a different way.

Ann Flaherty
Even with those conditions, neighbors described a line of interested buyers that wrapped around the block.

Unidentified Neighbor
My husband came in and said, you've got to look out the window, and there was a line from the house all the way to the middle of the block right here.

Ann Flaherty
So there you have it. There are affordable deals to be had. You just have to find a place to live in the meantime and perhaps roll the dice that the property will still exist in a few decades.

You gotta wonder if this kind of sale would make the renter nervous to leave the house because the next owner would be waiting for them to turn it over. I'd be scared to walk my dog. For more on these stories, visit abcnews.com or the ABC News app. I'm Ann Flea. Brad's back tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

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