--:-- Gideon Resnick: Hi there, I'm Gideon Resnick. Before we get into today's episode, we have a question for you. Do you have kids? And if so, do you have rules for social media in your house? On our interview show, Apple News in Conversation, we're putting together an episode all about youth mental health and social media. And we wanna know what you think, what's working or not working when it comes to social media in your family. If you'd like to share how you're navigating this issue, use your iPhone's voice memos app to record yourself. Tell us your name, where you're from, and your experience. And please try to keep it to about a minute or so. You can send it to us at applenewstoday at apple.com. Again, that's applenewstoday at apple.com and we might include your voice on the show. Thanks.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Good morning. It's Monday, July 1st. I'm Gideon Resnick in for Shamita Basu. This is Apple News Today. Coming up on today's show, the Trump movie that's stuck in limbo, Bracing for Hurricane Beryl, And Simone Biles is back in the Olympics. But first, we now have the Supreme Court's ruling in what is arguably the biggest case of the term. Former President Donald Trump's argument that he is immune from prosecution for actions taken while he was in office. In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, the court said that a president does have immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts taken in office, but not for unofficial acts.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: On NBC, legal analyst Danny Savalos explained. The court does hold today that there is absolute immunity, but only for those core presidential functions. Think veto power, the pardon power, a very limited set of core presidential powers. The big question now is, when will the DOJ case against Trump over election interference move forward? He was indicted last August by the special counsel Jack Smith. The case has been on hold, awaiting today's ruling. It will now be up to the lower courts to determine how to apply the Supreme Court's ruling to that case, and whether the actions he's being prosecuted for are considered official or unofficial.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But as CBS congressional correspondent Scott McFarlane explained, it's less and less likely the trial will start before the election in November. It looks like it's a longer shot, like winning the lottery, because some of this has to go back to Judge Chutkin, the district court judge who's been assigned the trial. And she may have to go through what's an official act, what's not an official act in the indictment. That's going to cost more time. That's going to cost more hearings. It's going to cost more bandwidth in a courthouse where they had just a narrow window to work with in the first place.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Supreme Court also ruled on some closely watched cases involving social media. Justices sent the Texas and Florida legal disputes back to lower courts and ruled unanimously that the lower courts had not properly evaluated the potential First Amendment issues at play. The cases involve laws that would have blocked social media platforms from removing content based on the views they express. Those are now on hold while litigation plays out.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: The Biden campaign spent the weekend in damage control after President Biden's debate performance Thursday night. A number of editorial boards and commentators have called for him to drop out of the race. The editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, wrote that Biden staying in the campaign would be, quote, an act not only of self-delusion, but of national endangerment. And a new CBS News poll shows that 72% of registered voters said that Biden does not have the cognitive health to be president.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But there is no indication yet that Biden plans to drop out. In fact, according to reporters, his family is encouraging him to stay in the race. And on Friday, less than 24 hours after the debate, Biden made his case at a campaign event in North Carolina, coming off much more forcefully, but acknowledging that things did not go well in the debate.
--:-- Joe Biden: I walk as easy as I used to. I don't speak as smoothly as I used to. I don't debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. But I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. I know like millions of Americans know, when you get knocked down, you get back up.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Given all of this, I wanted to get back on the line with the New Yorker's Evan Osnos. He wrote a book all about Biden and knows his political instincts well.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: What's really interesting, if you know Joe Biden's pattern of decision making, is that I can see the evidence of something happening right now, which is that he's he's torn between these two instincts that have always been guiding him in politics. One is that when you get knocked down, you get back up, as he says. And that's more than just a kind of cheesy motto. It's really at the essence of how he sees his whole history in politics over 50 years.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: But the other instinct is that sometimes you read the room and there is just no way to win and you have to get out. And he's done that twice in his political career during presidential campaigns in 1987 and 2008. And he is right now in the grip of those two competing impulses.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And in the meantime, Democratic surrogates have largely tried out a couple of different things in terms of their defense of the president. One, I think, is demonstrated by Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock, who was on Meet the Press yesterday, basically saying something to the effect of, you know, don't judge the president based on 90 minutes. Judge him based on his life of public service. Joe Biden has demonstrated not over 90 minutes, but over the last four years, the character and the metal of the man that he is.
--:-- Evan Osnos: He also criticized some of the media coverage, saying, you know, this is not a football game, shouldn't be covered in that manner. So what do you make of media coverage in the last few days, including editorial boards at a number of publications moving so quickly to call for him to step down as a candidate?
--:-- Evan Osnos: In some ways, I understand what Raphael Warnock and other Democratic surrogates are saying. I mean, they are making the point that this is bigger than one night. And, you know, even if you're not persuaded by the idea that his character and commitment to public service over 50 years is a counterweight to the negative performance that he had on Thursday, one could argue that his three and a half years in office has been an example of legislative achievements and complex foreign policy navigation, which could argue for his ability to do the job.
--:-- Evan Osnos: The problem is that an election is partly an evaluation of somebody's record in office, but it's also a projection of how people imagine somebody going forward over the next five years. And one of the big sources of concern right now is that even if Joe Biden can be vigorous and strong on one day, the fact that he can be knocked back so hard by getting a cold, which is one of the things that seems to have been happening according to the campaign. That's what gives people real concern.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And because the stakes are so high, because we know that the alternative here, as Joe Biden has eloquently explained, is really dire in the possibility of a second Trump administration. That's what makes Democrats so gravely concerned about ensuring that he can not just win, but do the job.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And so far President Biden has given no indication that he is considering dropping out of the race. You mentioned this concept of him sort of reading the room and making a judgment after the fact. So I want to ask what if anything would change his current position and considerations. And is there enough time to essentially recover from this particular moment if he does indeed stay the course?
--:-- Evan Osnos: This is the absolutely most crucial period. And it's really over the next week and maybe two weeks because he has to demonstrate in his performances, his presence, his interviews, his events, that he is at least as much North Carolina version of Joe Biden as he was the Atlanta debate stage version. That's really what's happening now. People are watching him.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And, you know, I remember interviewing him a number of times about this question of age going back to even 2014. I remember asking him about how he would know if he was up for the job. And he would said, people can watch me. They can decide for themselves, see if I have the passion and the capability. And that's literally what is happening now.
--:-- Evan Osnos: And I think the way he will decide ultimately is not frankly based on what the editorial boards of big publications say that has less personal impact on him than the judgment of people who have been very close to him for a very long time. Some of them family members, his wife, of course, his sister, but also perhaps even more importantly, a few political aides who had been with him from the beginning and he trusts their sense of the electorate.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Let's talk about that scenario for just a second, a purely hypothetical one. We cannot say that this is happening, is likely to happen, will happen. We can't. But what does it look like should Biden come to that choice to step aside? Who replaces him? How does it get decided? What is the process there?
--:-- Evan Osnos: It could go in a lot of different directions. If he decided and he came forward the way that, for instance, Lyndon Johnson did or Harry Truman did and said, I'm not going to run for reelection, even though I'm the incumbent. At that point, it would become an open contest among Democrats. Most likely there are perhaps a half a dozen obvious promising candidates who would immediately be on the shortlist of people, people like Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Westmore of Maryland, or, of course, Kamala Harris, the vice president.
--:-- Evan Osnos: There are some technical details that are very, very important. Number one, the money that the campaign has raised belongs to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, meaning it doesn't immediately transfer to some other candidate. And so she has a big voice in what happens. And then the last thing I will mention is this all has to happen pretty fast. It has to happen in about the course of the next four and a half weeks.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Let's go to another storyline involving Trump. At the Cannes Film Festival, a movie called The Apprentice got a lot of attention. It sort of follows Trump as he goes from being this naive kid who is trying to please his father through great real estate acquisitions like Trump Tower to what he is today. Washington Post culture reporter Jada Yuan has seen the film.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: It shows how Roy Cohn showed him a Machiavellian playbook that he uses to these days. It's how he got his ideas about never admitting defeat, always fighting for your point of view to be the correct one. So it's basically an evolution of Donald Trump. But here where things get complicated. Some people close to the production tell The Post that billionaire Trump donor Dan Snyder is attempting to block the U release of the movie. Snyder is a major funder of Kinematics, the production company behind the film.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Trump's lawyers issued legal threats against the movie. It includes a depiction of rape. Ivana Trump once made this allegation against her then-husband, Donald Trump, though she later recanted, and he denied it. Yuan says it's not clear why the film doesn't have a U.S. release date and to what degree politics is at play.
--:-- Jada Yuan: Is this just a financial decision that the kinematics doesn't like the deal that the producers have come up with? Or is it Dan Snyder, a Trump supporter, pulling strings and basically trying to not get the movie seen in the United States? Studios like Sony and Disney have passed, as have streamers, including Apple, Amazon, and Netflix.
--:-- Jada Yuan: Now, there are various reasons they may have declined. The Hollywood Reporter notes that the industry has been more reluctant to bet on polarizing political films, which are risky at the box office. The filmmaker has his own theory, and Yuan explained what she thinks is going on.
--:-- Jada Yuan: Ali Abasi, the director, told me that in all the conversations that he's heard, distributors are concerned that Trump will become president and then use his regulatory might to enact some kind of retribution for whatever distributor puts this out. There is also the sense that his many followers could do what they did to Bud Light and boycott or pay retribution to the company that puts it out.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: While an independent distributor has shown interest, Yuan reports that the deal is stalled. And some people say it's because Snyder, the funder of the production company, just doesn't like the movie. Though the movie is generating some buzz, especially for the performance by Succession star Jeremy Strong.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Some critics see him as a possible Oscar contender for his role as Trump fixer Roy Cohn. But all the off-screen drama means that it's unclear when, or even if, many American moviegoers will get a chance to see it.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Before we go, let's take a quick look at some other stories that are in the news. Former Trump advisor Steve Bannon begins a four-month prison sentence today for defying a congressional subpoena. He did not comply with the House committee that was investigating the January 6th attack on the Capitol.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Meanwhile, Hurricane Beryl is rampaging through the Caribbean, bringing dangerous winds and storm surges to islands there. It's an unusually strong storm for this early in the hurricane season. Over the weekend, it became the only Category 4 storm ever recorded in June.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And in France, the first round of parliamentary elections looks to be a historically strong showing by the far-right party. Polls show it beating a left-leaning coalition, as well as President Emmanuel Macron's centrist party. And if those numbers hold in a runoff later this month, Macron may have to share power with a far-right government. That has not happened in France since it was occupied by Nazi forces.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Finally, in sports, Simone Biles is off to her third Olympics after dominating the U.S. trials over the weekend. Making the team a third time is something that only three other U.S. women gymnasts have done before. And at 27, she's the oldest competitor to make a U.S. Olympic gymnastics team in more than 70 years.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: Biles told NBC that looking after her mental health has been the key. Being in a good mental spot, seeing my therapist every Thursday, it's kind of religious for me. So that's why I'm here today.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: You can find all these stories and more in the Apple News app. And if you're already listening to the News app right now, we have a Narrated article coming up next. Bloomberg Businessweek looks at how companies return to office policies are making things difficult for working mothers. If you're listening in the podcast app, you can follow Apple News Plus Narrated to find that story.
--:-- Gideon Resnick: And I'll be back with the news tomorrow.
