Opinion | Collusion vs. Stop the Steal – By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. (Wall Street Journal) / Nov 24, 2023
When Americans say they don’t want Trump vs. Biden, listen to them.
A recent column observed disconcertingly that election denial appears to have been a successful strategy for Donald Trump. But how exactly? Larry Kudlow, his former White House economic adviser, points out that many voters like Trump policies, which is true. How does “stop the steal” advance their cause? One might also ask how and why collusion continues to work for Democrats. Both began as a set of claims but became something else, a litany, articles of devotion, a thematic glue to hold together a standard stump speech.
My inbox is as revealing about collusion as it is about stop the steal, with some Democrats clinging to whatever they heard first, including the legend of the Moscow hotel room, long since debunked by the U.S. Justice Department. The harder-working insist, “Didn’t Trump do business with Russia, didn’t Russian lobbyist Natalia Veselnitskaya gain entry to a Trump Tower meeting by promising ‘dirt’ on Hillary, didn’t Mike Flynn share confidences with the Russian ambassador, didn’t a report by Senate Democrats claim without citing any source that an ex-Manafort consulting partner was a Russian intelligence officer?”
The same is true on the GOP side. They point to isolated cases of vote fraud, inevitable in any election. They point to states and localities changing their election laws in questionable ways, to dishonesties about the Hunter Biden laptop, though neither amounts to vote fraud.
