North Dakota's Republican governor, Doug Burgum, is more than willing to pay for it. Burgum made waves a year ago when he announced his highly unlikely run for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. (He's rich, which is always a plus.) He did poorly, but that was probably more positive than negative: He never had to attack Trump too hard, but he still got his attention. Now he's being talked about as a candidate for his party's vice presidential nomination.

That brought him to NBC News' “Meet the Press” on Sunday, where – with a ping of his political E-ZPass – he aptly formulated the Republicans' response to concerns that Trump was seeking authoritarian power: No, that's what the Democrats want.

Moderator Kristen Welker asked if Trump's comments during last week's presidential debate had the effect of “undermining people's faith in democracy itself by raising questions about the fairness of the 2020 election.” That was not the case, Burgum replied, because “both parties have done this.” His evidence that Democrats had done this was as familiar as it was scant: calling for a recount in 2000 or grumbling about the outcome in 2016.

“If we want to move forward as a country,” Burgum said, “we need to have elections that both parties agree on.”

On paper, this seems uncontroversial. In context, however, it is anything but. Trump's efforts to undermine 2020 involved convincing and encouraging Republicans to reject the election results. So a compromise that both parties agreed to inevitably meant that the reality of Trump's defeat was somehow undermined. Setting that standard for the future means that partisanship should set the limits of acceptability, not mathematics. This is precisely what worries those who worry about Trump's approach to democracy.

Welker countered as one might hope: Wasn’t it alarming that Trump did not admit defeat?

Burgum did not believe it because “Trump left the White House at the end of his term on January 20th. We had a smooth transition.”

Welker brought up January 6 as a counterpoint to this argument.

“Well, I think we have to say it was a smooth transition,” Burgum replied, which we certainly don't. A second later, he got to the central point.

“I think that in 2024 both parties will be very focused on [the election]”, he said. “I think the threat to democracy is that today, as governor of North Dakota, I live under what I call the Biden dictatorship because of all the rules and regulations.”

Welker noted that Biden has issued fewer executive orders than Trump and Burgum himself, and asked if that made Burgum the “dictator of North Dakota.” Burgum claimed he was merely “trying to cut red tape” and changed the subject.

But here too the rhetoric applies: The Democrats are the real Threat to democracy. It's not always articulated the way Burgum did, but it's routine. The violence that followed some protests against police brutality in the summer of 2020 was worse than the Capitol insurrection. The arrest of those who participated in the insurrection was not a response to an attempt to undermine democracy, but was itself such a subversion. The problem is not what Trump is doing; it's Biden and the Democrats and their “wokeness” and their labeling of social media posts as false and their changing the election rules and so on. The problem is not us and it's not Donald Trump. The problem is them and it's dictator Biden.

That Democrats and Republicans view the threat to democracy as a significant problem has been evident in opinion polls for some time. Last month, a Fox News poll found that members of both major parties see the threat to democracy as a result of restricted freedoms rather than a result of compromised elections.

Over the weekend, CBS News polls conducted by YouGov showed just how widespread that sentiment is. Most Democrats said democracy would only be safe if Biden won in November. Most Republicans said it would only be safe if Trump won.

The net effect is that Americans as a whole are divided, with a majority believing that democracy will not be protected if Biden wins and a (mostly different) majority believing that it will not be protected if Trump wins.

As Welker noted to Burgum, portraying Biden as a “dictator” for taking executive actions is simply ridiculous. It became even more ridiculous after the Supreme Court ruled on Monday that Trump's efforts to rig the 2020 election were largely immune from criminal prosecution. It's not even clear to what extent Burgum believes that.

But it's clear that's exactly what Trump wants to hear from a potential vice president. And it's also clear that many Republicans believe that and view Biden as a dictator because he's using the power given to him by the 2020 election to push through his agenda.

If you believe the election was illegitimate because Trump convinced you so, it's not hard to see where that perception of Biden comes from.