House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi had to abort a news conference Monday after a swarm of protesters hijacked the stage and shouted her down.
The protesters, who were angry at Pelosi for trying to reach a deal with President Trump on the DACA program, chanted "You're a liar" and "All 11 million," referring to the total number of illegal aliens believed to be in the United States.
But former Secret Service agent and NYPD officer Dan Bongino, appearing on Fox News' "Fox & Friends" Tuesday, said while the maneuver was dumb, Pelosi and her Democratic colleagues have no one to blame but themselves for their plight.
"If you watch that, you almost semi-sympathize with Nancy Pelosi until you wake up in the real world and you realize that she brought this on herself," Bongino said. "She says, 'You're not helping the situation.' The Democrats are the situation, and I'm not talking about the guy from the Jersey Shore. They are the situation. They're the ones who created this problem. They are the ones who opened up the door for people who came here illegally into the country to get citizenship and to get work permits, and then to give that benefit to the children of people who came here illegally."
Pelosi responded to the protesters by saying, "You've had your say, and it's beautiful music to our ears," according to the San Francisco CBS affiliate. But when she couldn't get the protesters to stop, the frustrated minority leader barked, "Just stop it now!"
Bongino, author of the new tell-all book "Protecting the President: An Inside Account of the Troubled Secret Service in an Era of Evolving Threats," marveled that the pro-DACA demonstrators were interrupting a politician who has fought to save DACA and has been generally friendly toward illegal aliens.
"This has to be the dumbest political strategy of all time," Bongino mused. "I mean, you have an ally in Nancy Pelosi, and you totally alienate her and potentially the rest of your Democratic friends by doing this. Just silly.”
Bongino likened this strategy to "one-dimensional checkers."
"I mean, what kind of a strategy is this?" he wondered aloud. "You have a political party on your side, and you show up knowing this is going to make a national cable audience and you embarrass yourselves and you scream the woman down and you make her look like a sympathetic figure? Just ridiculous. Just a dumb strategy all around."
Bongino said far-left activists who push for amnesty and open borders will keep pushing for more and more outrageous demands.
"They don't think like we do," he said. "They think in terms of pushing the window farther and farther to the left. They don't think in terms of reasonableness. And by opening the door the Democrats created this problem. They should have shut it down and said, 'Citizenship should mean something, end of story, that's not a partisan issue.'"