Were Biden's Election Legitimacy Remarks Dangerous or Just Stupid?

In the middle of a nearly two-hour, nearly 18,000-word press conference on Wednesday evening, President Joe Biden seemingly cast doubt over whether the upcoming midterm elections would be "illegitimate" if Congress did not pass a series of voting reform bills he has proposed.

"I'm not going to say it's going to be legit," Biden said at one point, after being asked to clarify an inarticulate remark he'd made earlier about trust in the electoral system. "The increase and the prospect of being illegitimate is in direct proportion to us not being able to get these…reforms passed."

On its own, that soundbite is clearly quite bad. If Biden's view is that American elections should not be trusted until Congress makes some changes, then he's staking out a position that could be used to undermine trust in any future election that occurs under the current rules. For that matter, he's also undermining his own victory in the last election—a victory and an election that many Americans already believe were illegitimate—by suggesting that our default setting should be to doubt the system.