In his campaign launch video, Joe Biden echoed a refrain common among establishment Democrats, retiring Republicans, and legacy media pundits since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016. The story goes like this: Trump is a malign interloper who swept in and “hijacked” the Republican Party, leading it astray from its true, noble ideals. Biden implies this in his opening pitch, saying that once we are rid of Trump, all will be more or less well.

I believe history will look back on four years of this president and all he embraces as an aberrant moment in time. But if we give Donald Trump eight years in the White House, he will forever and fundamentally alter the character of this nation—who we are—and I cannot stand by and watch that happen.

The problem, to Biden, is entirely the president. In the video, which runs over three minutes, the now-three-time presidential candidate does not once mention the party that nominated Trump, elected him, enables him, and still supports him at a 90-percent clip.

Biden’s thesis is apparently shared by former Clinton press secretary Joe Lockhart. “Mr. Trump has abandoned most of the core principles that have defined Republicans for the past century,” Lockhart wrote in a recent opinion piece in the New York Times. “Fiscal conservatism [has been] replaced by reckless spending and exploding deficits.”

“What’s left of the party,” Lockhart argued, “is a rigid adherence to tax cuts, a social agenda that repels most younger Americans and rampant xenophobia and race-based politics that regularly interfere with the basic functioning of the federal government.” Lockhart, who also advised John Kerry during the 2004 presidential campaign, insisted the president has transformed what was an honorable Republican Party into an organ of “Trumpism.”

This notion, that Trump is somehow an alien figure who has, Svengali-like, hypnotized the GOP, is a comforting fallacy. But the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is not all that ails the country’s politics. Trump is just the symptom—the Republican Party is the disease.