President Joe Biden joined Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and numerous other Democrats this week in a partisan attempt to preemptively delegitimize the 2022 election. Twice the president was asked by reporters whether voters could trust the electoral system, and twice the president contended that a fair election was unlikely unless the Senate was blown up and the Democrats’ election power grab was passed – a maneuver that poses a far more serious and lasting threat to the constitutional order than anything Donald Trump is cooking up right now.

“I think it would easily be illegitimate,” said Biden. “The increase in the prospect of being illegitimate is in proportion to not being able to get these reforms passed.” Vice President Kamala Harris, sent out on the morning shows Thursday, offered basically the same position.

For people lamenting the “Big Lie,” this is nothing new. Trump’s election fraud conspiracy theories have been endlessly documented. Sometimes it sounds as if he has merely appropriated the language of Democrats, who’ve been playing this ugly game for years. And it’s not only the post-election evidence-free Stacey Abrams-style sore-loserism that we’re typically subjected to. It’s far more pervasive.

Needless to say, political journalists did not stalk every elected Democrat, demanding their solemn attestation to the sanctity of the 2016 presidential election lest they be expelled from society as apostates of “democracy.” Far from it. Hillary Clinton claimed that Trump was an “illegitimate” president on numerous occasions.