Donald Trump, stainless, exempt from costs due to the web of causes against him, consolidates with a wide advantage in the Republican internal elections. His candidacy, if confirmed, would be a good news for President Joe Biden who is confident that, if he faces the populist tycoon again, he will defeat him as in 2020.
It assumes, with some accuracy, that it will be able to benefit again from the medieval political and moral profile of the former president to absorb the votes of those who reject him, including those who consider the re-election of the Democratic leader calamitous but a lesser evil. Also, capitalize on the more or less similar age between the two so that the issue of age and old age does not become a battering ram against him in the campaign.
A problem that would be extremely harsh if the Republican governor of Florida, Ron de Santis, 44 years old and with his children in the primary, managed to face Biden. Today seems difficult. The differences in favor of Trump are around 50%.
The verification of this advantage at the hands of a leader who embraced lies as a political resource, who isolated his country, managed with mediocrity and confusion, particularly with the pandemic and public spending skyrocketeda major sin in the republican manuals, eloquently explains the setbacks of the present of the North American power.
Neither of them, and neither is De Santis, are leaders with strategic vision. An evil of contemporary politics that stagnates politicians in the pure conjuncture. Footnote example of these deviations: Biden’s follow-through of Trump’s policies to dangerously lock up China instead of bridges of coexistence.
In geopolitics the destruction of the adversary should not enter into any analysis. He alt rightthe ideological tendency, to call it something, which is embraced by extreme right-wing national populism, Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban, Jair Bolsonaro, Trump and his legion of imitators, starts from the base that everything alternative is insidious and must be disowned and amputated.
One extreme is De Santis endorsing censorship of books at levels never seen in his State, even mathematics because they allude, in no way, to questions of sex. But also against texts that review the racism that permeates American history. Obscurantisms that had disappeared in the country with a democratic breadth.
contaminated context
This contaminated context It serves to understand the explosive nature that the litigation over the increase in the debt ceiling that allows the White House to settle its accounts has taken on. The all-or-nothing notion has raised to realistic levels the possibility that the country will default on June 1 due to Republican objections to a deal that does not include the surrender of the White House.
The procedure by which the legislature gives the green light to the Executive has generally been barely bureaucratic with at least 79 successful chapters year after year, many of them under Republican governments.
But it was complicated by the emergency of extremist wings As the tea party among the Republicans, an ultra-religious minority force critical of the federal government to which it obsessively attributes the power’s loss of global centrality. That vision was later channeled into Trumpist populism with the idea of recovering the powerful USA of the last century. Make America great again.
The current crisis has a precedent of similar severity in 2011 when these relentless groups sought strangle the first government of Barack Obama who was even denied his US citizenship.
The litigation raged to such an extent that rating agencies such as Standard & Poor’s lowered the US credit hierarchy while the Stock Exchange dropped double digits in a single day before the imminence of bankruptcy.
At that time, the US debt was 14.4 trillion dollars, fueled in particular by the national and global crisis of 2008 that erupted during the last stretch of the Republican government of George W. Bush. Today it exceeds 31 trillion dollars.
To resolve this colossal distortion, Obama accelerated the decrease in social spending in favor of prioritizing the rescue of banks and corporations that were sailing among reds. The government even nationalized Citicorp shares to avoid its fall after the sudden collapse of the junk mortgage business.
Companies like General Motors came to offer surprising 2 for 1 business: For the purchase of a van, another one was delivered free of charge in the absence of customers.
So while the government worked hard to avoid a major collapse of the system, left behind individual tsunami victims who lost savings, homes and government assistance. Therein lies one of the roots among many to explain the rise of Trump and the populist reason for him as a vehicle of social fury.
Now the tycoon, whose chances of returning to the White House they should not be disdainedexacerbates that behavior and has called on his party to break the negotiations and let the country fall into bankruptcy in order to strike down the Democratic government in spite of the cataclysm that would shake the country and the world.
There are objective reasons behind the resilience that populism exhibits in North America. Although Biden cut the deficit, he managed to lower inflation and virtually wipe out unemployment, a poll this week by the Federal Reserve He showed the frustrations that the country drags.
It maintains that “the rise in prices negatively affected the majority of North American households and the general financial well-being decreased compared to the previous year despite the fact that the labor market remained solid”. When looking at the details, the research notes that almost a quarter of those surveyed acknowledged that their expenses had increased in 2022 but their income had not.
no medical care
“About two-thirds said they stopped using a product or used it less because of higher prices, while 51% indicated that they reduced their savings. And about 28% reported having been without some form of health care in the past year. because they couldn’t afford it,” he says.
This displeasure is conveyed in political terms and, as happens in other borders, it is expressed in nationalisms that erode the democratic game. There are multiple laws approved in the North American interior to guarantee a qualified vote by limiting the right to choose of minorities.
The main opposition negotiator, the head of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy, a Trump ally, is a agonal exponent of those contradictions. He reached that position after the midterm elections in which the Republicans narrowly won control of the lower house.
But the legislator had to overcome 15 votes from his colleagues before being appointed, questioned by the same fanatical minority of the tea party that wrested all kinds of concessions from him, in particular the possibility of being removed by a single vote that questions him. So the greater toughness he exhibits in negotiations is in direct proportion to his political survival.
Republicans today, as before with Obama, are looking for Biden to give in on social and environmental issues that will wear him down ahead of next year’s elections. They demand stricter requirements for unemployment aid recipients and a transformation of the energy law, in its green chapter.
The White House proposal has been balance fit with increases in taxes on the highest income sectors, an option ruled out by the Republicans who during the Trump administration struck down those taxes. The setting should be down.
Biden, who supports extraordinary military spending for supporting Ukraine in the war against Russia, ended up conceding a trillion dollar reduction (millions of millions) in social spending that will be reflected in austerity measures. The step raised hopes of a settlement. But it is not clear if it reached.
The figure is similar to the record of a trillion dollars of the military budget without extras resolved for the current financial year, which includes more than 110 billion dollars already committed in the European war conflict.
Final data. Proof that in politics archives are worth less and less, during Trump’s administration the debt ceiling was raised three times. Eight trillion dollars of the current reds, more than 16 times Argentina’s GDP, were generated during that chaotic administration. Stainless.
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