Former President Donald Trump declined to commit to a debate between his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Kamala Harris last week, correctly anticipating that the Democratic Party would successfully force Joe Biden from the presidential nomination and that to schedule a debate “would be unfair to Gavin Newsom, JB Pritzker, Gretchen Whitmer, or whoever Kamala Harris picks as her running mate.” Although Trump was proved right within the weekend as the current president announced he was stepping down in the race and endorsing his own vice president, Democrats have already pivoted to attacking Trump for wanting to renegotiate the terms of any future debates.

Trump, who literally ended Biden’s career with a single debate, is not a “coward” for renegotiating his debate terms with Harris because, as the matter currently stands, the original debate deal is dead. Although Trump catered to the absurd demands of the Biden campaign, the “Biden campaign” no longer exists. Harris is an undemocratically elected presumptive nominee who is replacing a previous presumptive nominee elected in a process that disenfranchised 17% of the country. And after facing an assassination attempt following years of Democrats smearing Trump as the No. 1 threat to our 248-year-old democratic experiment, we should never again be force-fed the lie that it is the GOP, and not the Democratic Party, that has tried to disrupt and sabotage our democratic process.

Notice that I did not write that Democrats or any one person is the preeminent “threat” to democracy, as Biden and his backers have called Trump for years. That would be a lie, and it’s the sort of lie that encourages unhinged maniacs to take such a suggestion to the logical conclusion that violent threats to a republic founded through a violent revolution must indeed be taken out by violence. As any immigrant from a communist or fascist country knows, actual threats to democracy cannot or should not be taken out merely through elections, as Trump once was successfully ousted in 2020.

But Democrats have indeed robbed their own voters (and tried to rob Republican voters) of their ability to cast their choice in the primary. While the progressive legal movement’s political prosecutions of Trump arguably constituted an implicit attempt to nullify the will of the Republican primary electorate, Democrats in a whopping 36 states tried to remove Trump from their primary ballots — a literal attempt to disenfranchise tens of millions of Trump supporters.

The Democratic Party seems to regard its own voters with even more contempt. In the Democratic presidential primaries in Indiana, Alaska, Ohio, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Montana, all other challengers to Biden were blocked from being named on the ballots, and the Democratic presidential primaries were outright canceled in Florida and Delaware. (In New Jersey, only an unknown pro-life activist was allowed as a named challenger to Biden, even though Marianne Williamson continues to pursue her quixotic bid against the incumbent.) All in all, the 57 million residents of those eight states amount to about 17% of the country’s population disenfranchised during the Democratic presidential primary. Considering that Biden only won 87% of the primary votes overall, that corresponds to roughly three-quarters of voters who had an actual choice in the primary voting for Biden.

And none of this is to mention leading Democrats’ pact with the press to silence the reality of Biden’s increasing senility and the mere existence of his primary challengers. Furthermore, given the overwhelming consensus in the polls that ordinary citizens have long agreed that Biden was too old to run for a second term, the party’s refusal to host a single debate ought to be considered a dereliction of duty, not just to its voters but also to its own interests.

Imagine an alternate 2024 timeline in which the party, recognizing the public opinion that Biden should not run again, allowed a single prime-time debate where Biden was handed a theoretical lay-up against Rep. Dean Phillips (D-MN) and new age guru Marianne Williamson. Presumably, Biden would turn in a similar performance as he did against Trump, and it would either signal a clarion call to the rest of the party that the primary was now open to serious contenders (no offense to Phillips, who has since been utterly vindicated in his warnings about Biden) or the voters would accept Biden’s senility as a known and acceptable quantity against Trump. Primary cycles with previous incumbents have been canceled by default before, but never had a primary opened with the tide of public opinion, if not elite opinion, so entirely against Biden. Yet forcing Biden through was a gamble Democrats and their media allies were willing to take, and now they’re paying the consequences.

The only reason that Democrats are stuck with Harris (who polls nearly as poorly as Biden and brings with her all of his administration’s baggage, instead of, say, the aforementioned Whitmer or Pritzker) is because it is quite literally too late, at least realistically speaking. It’s too late, politically, yes, for a potential future 2028 front-runner to gamble on challenging the first black and female vice president for the Democratic presidential nomination with 106 days to go until the election, but it is also too late as a matter of the law and democracy. Legally, Harris is the only candidate entitled to the $250 million war chest amassed by her boss, and thanks to the vast expansion of early and mail-in voting, ballots have to be printed physically in a matter of weeks. Furthermore, not a single voter actually cast a primary ballot for Harris, but seeing as she is Biden’s running mate, she is the choice that most closely correlates with the choice of the 72% of the population that actually had an option in the primary who voted for him.

Democrats will rightly point to Trump’s actions leading up to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot as a few weeks in time in which Trump tried to sabotage our democratic process, and they are correct. It’s also why members of his own party voted to impeach and convict him for his post-2020 election meltdown, and it’s why the GOP held a robust 2024 primary with governors, senators, and his own vice president challenging him.

But the GOP heard the will of the people, and Trump is its legitimate nominee. Harris is a candidate nobody voted for, and she’s replacing a candidate nearly a quarter of the Democratic electorate rejected or didn’t actually choose. The lead-up to Jan. 6 was a matter of a few embarrassing weeks. The cover-up and coronation of Biden, culminating with a palace coup to nominate Harris, has been happening for years. Neither Trump nor Biden is an actual “threat” to democracy, but if we have to point to one party that has actively been trying to undermine the democratic process, it is the Democratic Party.