The Hur Report And The "Stop The Steal" Subtext

A largely unspoken takeaway from Joe's Thursday night press conference has been that establishment media and government figures have conspired to conceal the reality of Joe's mental condition from the public. Democrat presidential candidate Dean Phillips said as much in his post on X earlier in the week when he apostrophized just those people:

But shame on all of you pretending everything is ok. You are leading us - and him - into a disaster, and you damn well know it.

Another post on X refers to a "gentleman's agreement" not to cover the issue:

Biden’s age is very clearly the most impt non-Trump issue in this elec. polling says so. Voters say so. It’s just the WH/DC have had a sorta gentleman’s agreement for the last year to pretend like it’s not. Maybe that ends now https://t.co/W7d6BPK9SW

— Astead (@AsteadWH) February 8, 2024

One of the movements most consistently derided in the wake of the 2020 election was "Stop the Steal". Here's the transcript of an NPR interview from 2022:

[New York Times reporter Charles] Homans says scores of groups at the state and local levels, with the help of right-wing media figures and activists, are taking aim at the electoral system. He also tells the backstory of Stop the Steal and traces its roots in the Tea Party movement that started after President Obama's election. Some Tea Party leaders were active in trying to overturn the 2020 election. The Stop the Steal movement didn't succeed in reinstating Trump, but it did succeed on another level. Homans cites polls showing that only about one-fifth to one-quarter of the Republican electorate considers Biden's presidency legitimate.

Here's commentary from The Telegraph following Joe's Thursday press conference:

Many of us had suspected it, but now we appear to have proof: Joe Biden’s presidency is an irresponsible con, perpetrated against the free world.

. . . The US establishment media largely turned a blind eye to Biden’s obvious deficiencies because they didn’t want Donald Trump to occupy the Oval Office for another four years. They glossed over Biden’s occasional incoherence and ineptitude because “no one could be worse” than the orange neanderthal who had pledged to Make America Great Again.

In other words, people who consider themselves responsible adults are starting to come over to the position that was previously held only by MAGA Republicans, that the 2020 election was a con, with the press and the elites enabling Biden's strategy of minimizing the public exposure he would otherwise have had in a traditional campaign. In short, the election was "stolen". I've already argued here that there was never anyhing improper about using the word "steal" in connection with the 2020 election:

The connotation of the word goes far beyond any literal definition of a property crime; definition 3 for "steal" in this on line dictionary is "to take or gain insidiously or artfully", as in "he stole her heart" or "she stole the spotlight".

. . . But even absent proof of electoral fraud sufficient to overturn ballot results, the use of the word "stolen" outside a specific legal context isn't a conspiracy theory; it's no more of a big lie than to claim an umpire is blind or someone can't organize a two-car funeral, when after all, if we check the facts, he quite possibly can, and for that matter, the umpire can see perfecly well.

This is one factor that's leading to Trump's quasi-incumbent status in 2024. In some measure, it explains the failure of any never-Trump candidate to gain traction in the abbreviated primary season, as well as the tendency of the electorate to discount the Democrat-driven Trump indictments. If the 2020 election was metaphorically but nevertheless in some credible way stolen, Trump ought to be the incumbent, and he's running in some part on the record of his first term.

Stop the Steal is moving to the mainstream, and it's a major, if unacknowledged, issue of the 2024 election, derived from the now fully acknowledged issue of Biden's mental capacity.