The electoral scenario in the US produces confusion.
Former President Donald Trump, who cannot exhibit wise previous management, is involved in almost
a hundred serious judicial cases
and who seriously derailed with the management of the pandemic, easily imposes himself.
On the other hand, the figure of Joe Biden is weakening despite the fact that he is closing his government with a series of important achievements in the management of the economy, the growth of the country and international leadership that the US had lost.
Disconcerting
.
One explanation is that Biden is losing and not Trump who is winning.
The tycoon maintains his same political strength, that of his adversary falls.
Possible motivation for this process is frustration.
People do not like either of them and between the two they choose the one who exhibits greater charisma and
a conceited and salvific populist speech
that Biden finds difficult to formulate.
The Democrat defeated Trump in the last elections with the combination of two factors: a certain wear and tear on the part of the tycoon and enormous help from economic corporations that feared, today fear, that a new Republican mandate
would demolish the credit and reputation of the United States. USA
Trump's insularity does not excite the establishment.
That vision is reflected in the editorial of
The New York Times,
an icon of traditional American power, published after Trump's devastating victory on Super Tuesday.
“A tragedy for the Republican Party and for the country,”
he defined.
"Contempt for the Constitution"
He added that a person is being chosen “at the expense of everything including integrity, principles, politics and patriotism.
“As an individual, Trump has demonstrated a
disregard for the Constitution and the rule of law
that renders him unfit to hold office.”
By the way, he also alludes to the need to support Ukraine and not lean towards Russia as the former president said.
President Joe Biden speaks to reporters before leaving the White House in Washington.
Photo New York Times
A key that explains this consequence continues to be
the economy
, as Bill Clinton's team maintained in the past with the added emphasis of
stupidity
to clarify to the Republicans why people rejected them after
Reaganomics
.
Today there is a general perception that things are worse and not better, despite the fact that the numbers are piling up in the opposite direction.
“A combination of strong growth, unemployment near the lowest level in 50 years and plummeting inflation
,
” lists Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman.
That is not, however, the view of many ordinary Americans.
If ordinary middle-class people who prefer Trump are consulted, they highlight a
contradiction between the macro figures and what is experienced
on a daily level, an opinion that adds to the collapse of public faith in institutions, a problem that is spreads throughout the world.
In that sense, as we will see later, Trump is an emerging part of a
global nationalist trend
that is growing fueled by a basic fact: the concentration of income that piles up the old middle classes on the sidelines outside the distribution.
An Argentine economist who graduated from the UBA, Rafael Ch., and has lived in the United States for three decades where he could not practice and had to work as a truck driver, is a Republican sympathizer and harsh critic of the system.
He managed to raise his family
by “breaking his back
,” he describes to this column.
One son is an engineer, the other an accountant.
In his opinion, what is happening is that “more than half of the citizens see Trump as someone outside the political mafia who
does not need corruption
to make money.
He is the claimant of American honor and pride, the defender of the middle class, a crazy man who is respected by the other crazy people who rule the world today.
The cases against the former president do not harm him because, he says, "the citizen feels that
justice
, the media and the institutions are being used to get him out of the way so that both Democrats and Republicans can continue doing their business."
What happens to the economy on that level?
He maintains that “it is true that the unemployment rate is low.
But it does not include people who
are already outside the system
.
As you know, a worker who loses his job can collect unemployment insurance for a limited period, after which if he does not return to the workforce he disappears from the system and no longer counts as unemployed.
The 14 million jobs created are low-paying jobs, which do not require secondary or professional training.
Jobs at last.”
Inflation went down, he acknowledges, but “it was caused by the tremendous increase in interest rates applied by the Federal Reserve to dry up the cash supply.
Today that interest is 4.25/5.50.
In the Trump era they were 0%
.”
US Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley who left the campaign after Super Tuesday.
Photo EFE
“Even so, the expected levels of deceleration in inflation were not reached.
Mortgage interests are at 6 or 7% (in the Trump era, 2.5%), which produced a
freeze in sales
in the real estate market with the consequent paralysis of construction,” he says.
Inflation in the changuito
He concludes: “I measure inflation every Sunday
when I go with my wife to the supermarket
.
Products that have increased 15 and up to 20%.
We buyers, who filled our carts, now look, compare and put them back on the shelf.
The shopping lists were reduced to what was strictly necessary, not to mention the medications that every government since I lived here more than 30 years has promised to make accessible but never happened.”
That vision includes a move away, very visible among these Republicans, from respect for the press, which is seen as part of a
harmful army of political activists,
and justice, which is described as part of widespread corruption.
This enormous frustration with the system, certainly exaggerated, is the foundation of a global phenomenon that has expanded hand in hand with the economic crisis that produced that
perverse effect of concentration and social exclusion
that we pointed out before.
The political consequence is
a retreat from modernity
with the establishment of political groups that build
messianic leaderships
, repudiate globalization due to their contempt for multilateralism, cling to fanatical religious forms and authoritarianism and xenophobia, and admire authoritarian models.
By chance, Trump's internal victory coincides with the elections in which the Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin, after striking down the entire opposition, in the complete and literal sense of the term, will seek a fifth term next week.
This process of consolidation of "national conservatism" will be even more visible in the legislative elections of the European bloc in June. Ultramontans like Trump's former advisor, Steve Bannon, affirm that "just as in June 2016, when the Brexit vote anticipated Trump’s victory in November, the European parliamentary elections in June of this year herald a great
landslide victory for the populist movement in the US.”
They are not liberal, just as the tycoon is not.
Rather, it is an army that
despises those republican artifacts
from the French Revolution and North American Independence.
In that line they are similar to the populists from the other side.
Let us remember Cristina Kirchner devaluing
the division of powers as an outdated legacy
from “when electricity did not exist.”
Or Trump, with an admiration close to envy when he learned that his Chinese colleague Xi Jinping was perpetuating himself in power.
The Republican had also spoken of third terms despite constitutional limits.
Biden is convinced that these specters are the ones that Americans
will end up exorcising in November
.
Maybe now with the support of the moderate Republicans who blessed the fighter Nikki Haley.
We will see.
Nothing is written beyond confusion.
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