The first debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will take place tonight from Thursday to Friday, European time, on CNN.
Never has a presidential election debate aroused so much concern and precaution on the part of the television channel which organizes and broadcasts the event. Everything was planned to the millimeter: no audience, no decor, no comments outside of speaking engagements, and timing worthy of an Olympic competition.
Normally, this debate should attract more than 70 million American viewers and between 200 and 500 million worldwide, particularly in South America and Europe.
This means that this election is worrying and that the two protagonists are intriguing. They are intriguing because of their age: 78 years old for Trump and 82 years old for Biden. This is the first time that the presidential elections have seen such elderly personalities confront each other. Their personalities are intriguing: very show-off on one side, too old-school on the other.
For many observers, this duel marks the impoverishment of the American political class. Politics interests less and less young graduates who prefer to go and earn money in the private sector rather than try to make a career with the Republicans or the Democrats. Even the old traditions in force in the great American families, which reserved one of their heirs for the service of politics, are disappearing. In the United States as elsewhere, democracy now offers little appeal to elites.
But what most obsesses international business circles are two questions:
– On the one hand, they want to know why Donald Trump is still so successful today despite his errors, his excesses and his lies.
– On the other hand, they want to understand why the Democratic Party failed to produce a younger successor to Joe Biden, beyond the lack of attractiveness of American politics.
First question: why is Donald Trump still so successful today that he is once again the favorite in the polls? The explanation of political scientists has always focused on Donald Trump’s talent for understanding American society and knowing that there is a significant part of the American middle class completely downgraded by the effects of globalization, and this t’s not wrong, at least initially. Populism was born from a difficult social situation for a good third of Americans, particularly attentive to all the promises of unrealizable improvements, and Donald Trump did not skimp on demagogic promises: of the social, of the fight against immigration and protectionism, the recipe has also been used extensively in Europe.
That being said, there is another less admissible reason. He promised economic and financial prosperity, and he delivered in large part. First, aid from a welfare state has multiplied, real estate loans (limit removed) have allowed Americans to resume their old habits of living on credit (including students). But then, all of America is convinced that Donald Trump is the most formidable money maker.
It is his image maintained by television shows and his peopolization in magazines, his taste for everything that is luxurious even if it borders on vulgarity. Finally, he has made quite a bit of money even though Forbes no longer ranks him among the richest in America. Trump always knew how to show that he was rich. With this image, people feel that they know how to make money for themselves and others. He has the keys. And the United States’ economic performance is thriving. Joe Biden did not go back on everything that worked and that had been boosted by Trump. The stock market has been driven by historic dynamism for almost 8 years. The Dow Jones and Nasdaq have more than doubled, almost every year.
Result: financial circles and all executives who work in this financial sphere are full of capital gains, shares and financial assets in general, not to mention real estate. New York, the Hamptons are dripping with money. But apart from the social class very invested in the financial industry, you should know that all American employees have their retirement expectations which have more than doubled this year. Retirees themselves, who live on their funded pension, have seen their income double in value again over the past year. Many Americans have gotten rich, many other Americans are convinced that their stock options will make them rich, and retirees are living well. The vast majority of Americans think it’s because of Trump. They will hold their noses, but they admit in the polls that Trump has found the martingale. The macroeconomic truth requires us to say that a society financed on credit, as is the case of the United States, can only last because the dollar is the world currency. One day or another the American system will have to be cleaned up. But that day will be another day.
The second question is why Joe Biden has not found a successor. The hypothesis of putting Kamala Harris, his vice-president, in the saddle no longer seems to be in force. So much so that Kamala Harris has disappeared from the radar screens of the political press. She is very discreet, but it is explained to the White House that she is ready in case Joe Biden has an accident. What is interesting is that businessmen who are very influential with the Democrats are leaking a very different scenario that would allow them to avoid Kamala Harris. These business circles would have convinced Barack Obama and Bill Clinton to start hunting for a young and credible candidate whom they could present and sponsor during the Democratic convention in September. No serious name has so far circulated with the exception of a Kennedy heir, but this hypothesis seems to be stillborn. On the other hand, the same businessmen allied to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton would have obtained from Joe Biden his agreement to step aside smoothly on one condition: that he be spared the ordeal of the balance sheet.
For your information, many Democrats would like us not to disrupt current economic policy. This shows that, in a democracy, if many people explain that they vote according to their feelings, their values and their morals, the same people rarely hesitate to vote against their portfolio.
But it’s a bit like that in France too. No ?
