Why does the left hate Trump? Their disdain is so visceral, so seemingly irrational that some have called it Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS). After all, given his accomplishments you'd think progressives, particularly those in the media, would be at worst neutral toward him, if not actually in love with him.
Yet when he announces that the United States is pulling out of Syria, a move that the left would slobber all over were it made by President Obama, the progressives at the cable shows have suddenly, like Bruce Banner transmogrifying into the Incredible Hulk, metamorphosed into war hawks, deriding the decision to pull out of a quagmire as a foreign policy blunder.
When the president gets a criminal justice reform bill through the legislature with 87 Senators voting for it, a bill for which the left has been pushing for decades, the progressives scarcely can bring themselves to notice that it was Jared Kushner and Donald Trump who were the key movers of the measure.
When it's announced that the Trump economy has generated the lowest minority unemployment numbers in history the left quibbles that that achievement germinated under Obama. Yet it's hard to point to anything the Obama administration did that would have produced these results.
When the president adopts protectionist trade policies, long a progressive desideratum, he's harshly castigated for starting a tariff war with China.
The left was embittered by Trump's temerity in defeating the lackluster Hillary Clinton in 2016 and hopeful, in what is perhaps an interesting case of psychological projection, that he will soon be implicated in some plot with the Russians to have stolen the election.
Yet despite the Stakhanovite efforts of Robert Mueller's team of Democratic prosecutors to leave no stone unturned they've apparently failed to turn one over that reveals any evidence of "collusion."
In fact, the inability (so far) to find any evidence that Trump and Putin have been holding hands has deflated progressives' hopes for impeachment and actually incensed them even further.
Of course there are policies the president has implemented or is pursuing that the left opposes - tax cuts, a border wall, a freeze on immigration from countries in which terrorism is spawned - but these seem hardly the sorts of issues that might be expected to generate the arrant hostility the left has shown toward the man.
After all, taxes were cut drastically under the sainted Democrat John Kennedy and a border wall and restrictions on immigration were popular among many liberal Democrats until less than a decade ago.
Of course, Trump also refuses to be bound to unwise agreements entered into with other nations by his predecessors. He's renegotiated NAFTA to make North American trade fairer for all parties, pulled out of the nuclear agreement with Iran which was mostly ineffective in halting Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons, and walked away from the Paris climate accords.
The latter is especially galling to the left since climate change has for liberals the status of a religious dogma, but the data on climate change is disputable, and subsequent events in France should give the left at least some reason to think that it might be a good thing we're no longer bound by those agreements.
Some will point to Trump's boorish, uncouth attitudes toward women as the root of the left's contempt for the president, but it's hardly credible to think that people who would gleefully vote for the Kennedy brothers, Bill Clinton, Robert Menendez, et al. are sincerely upset over Donald Trump's sexually dubious biography.
Others accuse him of racism and bigotry, but the allegations are usually stand-alone assertions, lacking in any hard supporting evidence, suggesting that perhaps there just isn't any.
In sum, the degree of hatred on the left seems wildly excessive, over the top, unfounded, and irrational, but maybe the explanation for it has nothing to do with any of the sorts of things mentioned above. Maybe the reason has to do with a growing desperation incited by what Trump is doing to the judicial branch of government.
In the past, the left could always count on activist courts to circumvent refractory legislatures and implement progressive policies, but Trump is quietly appointing dozens of judges to the federal bench who believe that their role is to interpret the law, not to make it.
Moreover, he's already appointed two Justices to the Supreme Court who seem to share that judicial philosophy, and, if he's re-elected in 2020, and if the Senate remains in Republican hands, he's almost certain to name one or two more.
This would change the ideological direction of the Court for at least another generation and constitute a potential disaster for progressives. It could halt, and perhaps even reverse, the left's long, steady slog toward a socialist, statist nirvana that they've assumed was just around the corner. Their long march through the institutions will have goose stepped right into quicksand.
Thus, the left's hope and sense of urgency that Trump be removed from office or otherwise politically neutered. The left fears that many of the progressive gains of the last thirty years or so are grievously threatened by a conservative judiciary, perhaps irretrievably, and in their panic they're saying and doing some remarkable, some absurd, some almost insane things.
Despite the fact that President Trump is doing much that they wished President Obama would've done, his reshaping of the judicial branch has made progressives desperate, and fear and desperation have apparently spawned in their liberal breasts an implacable hatred for the president.