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On Tuesday this week, the rating agency Fitch dropped the credit rating of the U.S. government from AAA to AA+. It said the downgrade "reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next two or three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance."
Fitch evidently lacks confidence in the two old men who hold what seem to be insurmountable leads for the nominations of America's two political parties. President Joe Biden, 80, has 63% in the RealClearPolitics average of recent Democratic primary polls, and former President Donald Trump, 77, has 54% among Republicans.
THE MIXED MESSAGES OF BIDENOMICS
Current general election polling shows Biden averaging 45% and Trump with 44% of registered voters. In other words, most voters, after experiencing four years of Trump's presidency and almost three years of Biden's, aren't ready to support either one for a second term.
Biden's 1% lead can't be reassuring to those who champion Biden as the only means of keeping Trump out of the White House. Despite his 4.5% popular vote plurality in 2020, he came within 42,918 votes in three states of losing in the Electoral College to Trump.
No wonder that CNN's analyst Harry Enten chilled many of the cable network's remaining viewers by saying Trump "is in a better position to win the general election than at any point during the 2020 cycle and almost at any point during the 2016 cycle."
So it looks like, as the unclassifiable conservative Rod Dreher posted on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, "the US will either be led by a woke ambulatory cabbage, or by a buffoon either facing multiple criminal trials or under conviction."
Thus on the day of Fitch's downgrade, the iconoclastic left-leaning investigative reporter Matt Taibbi wrote, "The campaign is pure chaos, Pompeii after the blast. In the annals of presidential races we haven't experienced many days like yesterday, July 31, which ended with the futures of all major candidates appearing hopelessly clouded."
Among the clouding events was the news that Trump was facing another indictment from federal special prosecutor Jack Smith and that Joe Biden was facing testimony from his son Hunter Biden's former business partner Devon Archer undercutting his 2019 and 2020 assurances that he never talked to his son about his odiferous business deals. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre had already preemptively abandoned that claim by saying the two were never "in business" together.
Much of the press was happy to accept the Biden nondenial denial, just as in October 2020, following the lead of 51 intelligence professionals orchestrated by current Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the Hunter Biden laptop was shrugged off as the product of "a Russian information operation."
As for Trump, he should have been embarrassed by the Washington Post's weekend story that he has spent $40 million of campaign funds on legal costs this year. But Republican primary voters rallied to Trump after leftist New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg (who effectively won his office by an 8,828-vote margin in a June 2021 primary) brought his laughably baseless indictment in April.
Trump was also undamaged by Smith's more defensible indictment for retaining classified documents, and Republican voters may stick with him after Smith's indictment for lying about the 2020 election. That indictment was based on a creative reading of federal statutes similar to the one Smith used to prosecute former Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, a conviction overturned by the Supreme Court 8-0.
Trump supporters, and others, have some basis for saying there's an obvious double standard operating here. They brought document retention charges against Trump but no charges against Hillary Clinton for retaining and destroying government documents. They let the statute of limitations run out on Hunter Biden's nonpayment of taxes on $1 million-plus in income. The press's slavish relaying of recent Biden talking points recalls its happy recital of Democrats' baseless Russia collusion hoax.
The hinges seem to be coming off both presidents' campaigns, except for most Democratic and Republican primary voters. Those dismayed by this stubbornness may want to recall the saying of the late Republican economist Herbert Stein: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."
The New York Times-Siena poll released Tuesday showed that 50% of Democratic primary voters want the party to nominate someone other than Biden. Among Republicans, the "MAGA Base" includes only 37% of primary voters, New York Times ace analyst Nate Cohn argues, while 25% are not open to Trump and 37% are persuadable, though those two groups have different views and may be hard to unite.
Will the water break among either primary electorate? Not clear. But there could be a big advantage for the party that first sloughs off an aging leader most voters are eager to reject. And Fitch might even upgrade America's credit rating.