Trump Derangement Syndrome is what done did the Democrats in.
On issue after issue, whatever former President Trump was for, the Democratic leadership and followership took an extreme position in opposition.
And that is what killed the Democrats in this election.
Trump campaigned on building a big beautiful wall on our southwestern border and having Mexico pay for it. Say what you will about a shaky campaign promise, but illegal border crossings plummeted during the Trump years.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) promised that Trump’s big beautiful wall was never going to be built, and she did her best to stop its funding.
President Biden did her one better. Instead of closing the border, Biden just let everybody in — at least, that was the message that a couple million illegal immigrants seemed to receive, as they flooded into Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California.
The border crisis is one of the top issues in this campaign. Trump Derangement Syndrome, completely avoidable, was its proximate cause.
Trump promised law and order, even as he signed landmark criminal justice reform. But because the Democrats hated Trump so much, they decided to go the other way. They elected the far-left squad in 2018, and these firebrands attacked the president’s pro-cop message and promoted a defund-the-cop strategy.
The result? First, there came the riots. Some Republicans even marched with the Black Lives Matter protesters, as woke corporations fattened their coffers with guilt-ridden donations.
After the riots came the efforts across the country to attack the police.
Democrats, because they hated Trump so much, embraced the anarchy. Some white liberals even thought that we deserved the punishment, as a form of cosmic penance. Of course, after a while, rampant criminality becomes exceedingly unpopular. And, not surprisingly, it is now one of the top issues that concern the voters, who don’t share the Trump Derangement Syndrome of their more liberal brethren.
COVID-19 was another place where TDS manifested itself.
Trump didn’t want to wear a mask because he didn’t think it worked.
Democrats immediately went all-in on mask mandates.
Trump wanted schools opened.
Democrats went all-in on keeping the schools closed.
When the president initially pushed for a vaccine, Democrats like then-Sen. Kamala Harris (Calif.) were warning against them, mostly because they were Trump’s vaccines. But when it became clear that vaccines weren’t going to come on the market until after the election — amazing how that happened — they went all-in, even mandating them against Trump’s better judgment.
One final piece of the COVID-19 puzzle came with the need to continue the shutdowns. In red states, this wasn’t an issue because Republican governors didn’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome. But in blue states and swing states run by Democratic governors, shutting down society seemed a way to punish the president and perhaps depress the Republican vote.
Trump Derangement Syndrome, of course, became the key political argument for the 2022 campaign.
Democrats continually focused on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. They warned about the dangers to democracy. They held hearings. They formed a special committee. They wasted countless hours on MSNBC and CNN.
But the voters didn’t care. They had moved on.
They had other concerns, like immigration, crime, rampant inflation and the lingering effects of the blue state shutdowns.
Trump Derangement Syndrome is on the ballot in 2022. And it is going to defeat the Democrats.
Feehery is a partner at EFB Advocacy and blogs at thefeeherytheory.com. He served as spokesman to former House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), as communications director to former House Majority Whip Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and as a speechwriter to former House Minority Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.).