January 3, 2023

In 2024, Donald Trump was elected president by 77 million Americans, two million more than voted for Kamala Harris. Republicans also won a majority in the U.S. House and Senate, giving the GOP a federal trifecta and a governing mandate. Democrats had a similar governing mandate during the first two years of both the Obama and Biden administrations.

Now relegated to minority party status, progressive Democrats are powerless to deliver their socialist paradise on Earth. So, they’re frustrated, angry, stricken with Trump Derangement Syndrome, and have gone stark raving mad. Lacking a realistic or rational public policy agenda of their own, Democrats have descended into a simplistic “We Hate Trump” resistance-movement flooding the courts with anti-Trump lawsuits, grid-locking government, and attempting to block any and every Republican initiative in Congress.

War on ICE

A case in point is the Democrats’ relentless war on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an essential instrument of Trump’s plan to find, arrest and deport illegal immigrants (especially criminals) who were ushered into our country under the Biden administration’s open-border policies. Having paved the way for those immigrants to illegally enter the U.S. and remain here, Democrats value them as a key political constituency and hope to harvest their votes forever when they become citizens.

Radical mobs around the country in Democrat controlled states and cities have provoked and obstructed ICE officers from doing their duty while Senate Democrats, led by Chuck Schumer, hatched a plot to shut down the entire Department of Homeland Security, of which ICE is an agency. Schumer, of course, was well aware that ICE had already been separately funded by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBB), signed into law by the president on July 4, 2025. So, the Democrat Senate filibuster shutting down DHS on February 14th was just a ploy and a bargaining chip to hold DHS hostage to Democrat demands to handcuff ICE. Another consequence of this piece of Democrat extortion was cutting off the paychecks of TSA workers (another DHS agency) at airports across the country, causing many of those workers to stay home.

DHS is a collection of numerous agencies including ICE, TSA, U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Coast Guard, Federal Protective Service, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security, and others that were combined under the DHS umbrella after the 9/11 attack on America to coordinate their missions more effectively. Stubbornly turning the screws ever tighter, just before the Easter recess Democrats demanded that Republicans accept a phony “compromise” that still hobbled ICE and also undermined the Border Patrol, knowing this bill would never be approved by House Republicans. Under pressure from Trump to make a deal, Senate Republicans took the bait and passed that bill, which was promptly rejected by House Republicans, to the delight of the conniving Chuck Schumer, who predictably blamed Republicans for the impasse. Trump later intervened with an emergency workaround instructing DHS to pay TSA workers retroactively with leftover funds from the OBBB.

It’s despicable that Democrats would stoop to these tactics causing millions of airport passengers to languish in lines for hours, disrupting air travel throughout the country, and shutting down DHS when our nation is especially vulnerable to Islamist terrorist attacks. Some have already occurred here in the midst of the war with Iran.

TDS symptoms on display

For now, Democrats are powerless to advance their agenda or “demand” much of anything from the elected Republican majority. How ironic it is that radical progressive Democrats claim Trump and Republicans are “a threat to democracy,” when this is precisely how democracy works when electoral shoes are on the other feet.

Rampant TDS symptoms are glaringly on display in Democrat behavior like the incoherent series of national “No Kings” anti-Trump demonstrations, with three so far. Masses have turned out costumed as everything from chickens to bunnies to outer-space aliens. Elderly women hippies from the 1960s abound joyously dancing and singing silly lyrics amidst a sea of signs praising Antifa, foreign terrorists, democratic socialism, communism, and the universe of woke progressive identity-politics LGBTQ tribes.

Others expressed hatred of Trump, America, Isreal, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism, baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, and Chevrolet. If this is a serious political protest, the mixture of rage and partying seems schizophrenic. It’s more like a group psychotherapy session reminiscent of the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Longtime KOA radio talk host and columnist for the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News Mike Rosen now writes for Complete Colorado.