Finally, a good month for Joe Biden

It doesn’t happen to him that often, so it’s worth noting: President Joe Biden had a very good March. Perhaps not enough to turn the tide, but enough for several national polls to indicate he could eke out a narrow victory against Donald Trump.

There is no reason to go and bet all your savings, and the November 5 election is still far away, but it is certain that Mr. Biden is in a much better position today than even a month ago.

It all started with the State of the Union address on March 7. With his energetic and vigorous speech, President Biden surprised more than one. This imposed figure in American politics is rarely a defining moment, even in an election year.

But it was still an important step for Mr. Biden to reassure his own party. While his opponents often describe him as an almost senile old man incapable of assuming the duties of president, he has shown himself in a much better light, so much so that no one among Democrats is worried about his ability. to run a presidential campaign.

He also managed to distinguish himself from Donald Trump by speaking about the essential values ​​of America which are honesty, decency, dignity and equality, which sets the tone of his campaign for the election of november. Nothing very new, but an angle of attack that pleases the Democratic troops.

Nothing very spectacular, then, but we can say that Joe Biden is back in the saddle.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was playing “he loses wins” in court. He managed to postpone, probably after the election, three of the four criminal cases in which he is accused. The most serious, the attempted electoral interference in Georgia, will probably not be heard before the November election.

But a criminal trial will have to take place for a rather embarrassing offense: either having falsified the accounting books of one of his companies in order to hide the payment of a sum of $130,000 to a porn actress so that she could keep the silence about an affair he allegedly had with her in 2006, while he was married to Melania Trump. Mr. Trump has always denied the facts.

But this kind of story, which is the delight of the newspapers sold in supermarkets, is not very good for the reputation of the person who wants to be the preferred candidate of the religious right, very powerful in the Republican Party. .

On April 15, he will therefore become the first ex-president in the history of the United States to have a criminal trial. In this case, he still faces up to four years in prison if convicted.

His other legal cases are not expected to be heard before the November election, but they could still harm the ex-president during the election campaign.

Thus, Mr. Trump was saved at the last minute by the New York State Court of Appeal, which reduced the bail he had to pay from nearly half a billion dollars to 175 million, a guarantee while awaiting a final decision from the courts in a civil case of alleged fraud. The former president is accused of having inflated the value of his properties, in particular to obtain more favorable loans.

But Mr. Trump was unable to pay the 464 million bail, even though he knocked on the doors of all the financial institutions specializing in guarantees. He will have to raise the 175 million by the end of next week.

This shows, at the very least, that he is not as rich as he claims to be, a wealth that is at the very heart of his founding myth. The former president even claimed that they were trying to prevent him from using his own money for his electoral campaign, something he had always refused to do until now.

In short, whatever the final decision of the courts in this case, there has been real damage to Mr. Trump’s reputation by the simple fact that he finds himself in the role of the accused in court. Which means he didn’t have a good month of March.

The polls reflect this. The average of polls from the Real Clear Politics website^⁠1 had been giving Mr. Trump the lead since last fall. However, the advantage in favor of Mr. Trump is now only 1.6%, after having reached up to 4% in recent months.

This may seem like a small margin, but American elections are almost always decided by a small margin. The last “easy” victory for a candidate was that of George HW Bush in 1988, with 53.5% of the vote against 45.7% for his opponent.

1. Visit the Real Clear Politics website

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