Facing a challenging re-election battle in the next election cycle, the new year could not have started on a worse note for the US President. There has been a visible post-mid-term-election increase in Joe Biden’s public standing in recent opinion polls. The current 44 percent job-approval rating – which is at par with what recent presidents Trump and Obama had more than two years in the job – is Biden’s highest since December 2021. But trouble looms, including from some unexpected areas.

Biden’s problems are intertwined between the economy and politics. As the new Congress is controlled by hardliner Republicans following the debacle that was the election of Speaker for the House of Representatives, there seems to be little to no room for compromise on the issue of stopping the oncoming train that is the ‘debt ceiling’ crisis. In fact, Republicans seem eager for a big fight with Democrats.

So it was last Friday when Biden’s Treasury Secretary notified Congress that the US would hit its debt ceiling within a few days (this week). There are only four months of time left to raise or suspend the ceiling if the US government is to continue to honor its spending commitments and make debt repayments on time. But considering that it has just been made really easy by hardliner Republicans to fire their new House Speaker, the latter would lose his job if he tried to cut a deal with willing Democrats.

Lots of parallels are being drawn with the 2011 debt-ceiling crisis under President Obama. That was a calamitous economic episode when another obstructionist Republican-led Congress refused to raise the debt ceiling (demanding deep spending cuts) and provoked the only rating downgrade of US government debt in history. The crisis was eventually averted, but it led to economic weaknesses that continued well into Obama’s second term after a nail-biting election win over Mitt Romney in late 2012.

With a recession looming amid a cost of living crisis, a debt crisis in the US somewhere around the mid-summer would greatly undermine the Biden administration’s ability to steer the economic ship. Even a protracted gridlock that eventually results in a deal may create havoc in financial markets, which are already skating on thin ice and have low confidence in governments post-Covid. Resulting economic damage may not only maroon Biden’s re-election bid, it will also have repercussions across the world.

Another big headache coming Biden’s way is the public disclosure of the discovery of some two dozen classified documents at his home and private office during the Trump presidency years. This casts a negative political spotlight on Biden, even though the security breach appears small. Already, former President Trump is currently under investigation for wilfully hiding hundreds of classified files at his Palm Beach resort in Florida. The ‘Biden paper’s revelation has consumed US media for nearly a week now.

Legal experts have judged Trump’s mishandling of piles of classified documents to be far worse and more dangerous than Biden’s small stash of papers. But in public opinion, a political scandal is now brewing, amplified by right-wing media which draws an equivalence between the behavior of both office-bearers, suggesting Biden is no better than Trump. Biden’s own Justice Department has, as a result, appointed a ‘special counsel’ to investigate the ‘Biden papers’. Not the kind of thing Democrats needed at all!