Joe Biden usually displays an incurable optimism. In his almost daily public interventions, he almost always appears calm. He likes to tell battles and make some joke or other. And, when he attacks his rivals, it is normal for him to resort to irony and whispering; For the annals and video libraries, his response from a year ago to the businessmen who complained about not finding a workforce remained: “Pay more,” he said, lowering his voice and approaching the microphone.
But sometimes the president of the United States loses his temper. And, in this last week, he lost it three days in a row. The questions about his son’s business in China, the harsh internal reports about the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago and, above all, the Supreme Court rulings against his plan to forgive student debt and against positive discrimination based on race in the universities transformed the serene president into an erupting volcano.
“This is not a normal court,” Biden snapped Thursday when asked about the Supreme Court ruling that had just ended decades of affirmative action in college admissions processes to counter the racial disadvantages black students still face here. and Hispanics.
“The Supreme Court misinterpreted the Constitution,” he said on Friday in view of the even more adverse ruling with which the court ruined his electoral promise to forgive a large part of the payment of student loans that, for a total of more than 400,000 million dollars , burden 40 million Americans. “The court’s decision was a mistake, it was wrong,” he added without any regard for the principle of separation of powers that he supposes prevails in the US.
Biden’s anger became apparent at the end of that same appearance when, regarding the report in which the State Department had just finally admitted Washington’s mistakes in the chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan two years ago, he insisted that he “had reason” when he defended the march of that country. They weren’t asking him about it and it’s obvious he knew it, but he didn’t care.
The president had already exhibited anger in its purest form with the “No!” that, loudly, he released on Wednesday the informant who questioned him about his involvement after a message in which his daughter Hunter allegedly lied to him to intimidate a Chinese businessman. The leader had tried to take the matter calmly, smiling mockingly, but at the second question he couldn’t take it anymore.
The roller coaster that is American politics advises against taking these outbursts from Biden as anything more than the photograph of a moment. It could have been a bad week, nothing more. But the also candidate for re-election in the 2024 presidential elections has reasons to be concerned about something more than some sentences, moreover, foreseeable; for the unpleasant, but obvious internal confirmation of the serious errors that he and his government committed when planning and executing the march on Afghanistan – with which, by the way, his popularity plummeted to never return to even 50% approval –, or by the growing attacks from Republicans and conservative media regarding the dubious activities of his wayward offspring.
While Biden watches helplessly as the overwhelming conservative majority of the Supreme Court (6 to 3) has mowed the grass under his feet for a year with the demolition of some of his policies on abortion, guns, climate and, now, debt student, the man who unbalanced that court in his favor by appointing three ultras judges, Donald Trump, barely accuses the blow of his own accusation for serious crimes related to the concealment of secret documents; nor for his civil conviction for sexual assault on the writer Jean Carroll; much less for the imputation of him for falsehood in relation to the bribery of the porn actress Stormy Daniels. Far from it, it turns out that the Republican leader is beginning to take advantage of the president in some polls of vote expectations for 2024.
And age appears to be a growing handicap for the octogenarian ruler. A poll published a week ago by NBC indicated that 68% of voters are concerned about their health. And another recent poll, conducted by The Economist and YouGov, found that 45% of independent voters believe that their age and physical condition “severely limit their ability to do the job.”
There is still a game. Trump’s legal problems, for now apparently innocuous in the general rankings, may end up taking their toll on him. At the moment, 34% of Republican and independent voters say that these pending accounts of the former president with the justice system make them less likely to vote for him.
But Biden is not on a roll. It is not by chance that he seems irascible.
