There are reasons why he is demonized. He has dramatically cut access to the Internet for poor people through the lifeline program despite numerous speeches where he has purported to champion access for those users. He uses his chairmanship to accuse people of being socialists who support Venezuela and want to undermine capitalism. He refused dozens of interview requests before finally giving a partisan and vitriolic interview to Breitbart.

He has also coordinated with the GOP to a degree that is not at all normal for the FCC chair:

“The collusion became so obvious that Senate Democrats officially asked Pai and his Republican colleague to hand over emails covering their interactions over concerns that what they were doing was seriously improper. Pai and O'Rielly simply refused to hand anything over.”

Under Wheeler, we saw the FCC become strongly partisan for the first time. “Under Democrats, about eight percent of votes on major orders split along party lines. Under Republicans, only four percent split on party lines. Under Chairman Wheeler, 26 percent of votes on orders have passed with yes votes from the Democratic Chairman, Commissioner Rosenworcel, and Commissioner Clyburn, with Republican Commissioners O’Rielly and Pai dissenting. The difference from the past is stark.” (note the 26% number includes all votes whereas the 4% and 8% numbers include only major policy decisions. If we considered only major policy decisions the percentage of partisan votes under Wheeler would be even higher: https://techpolicyinstitute.org/2016/02/16/the-partisan-fcc/ )

Many arguments for Pai’s views assume he will inject much more competition into the ISP space despite not making efforts to address the systemic issues that Google Fiber hit around digging up roads to lay redundant cables (since no shared access is granted) or fighting through lawsuit after lawsuit to be able to use utility poles. Meanwhile he is open to further monopolization in the cell phone industry where he has already admitted he would strongly consider allowing us to go from four to three major wireless carriers: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/fcc-chairman-ajit-pai-open...

Meanwhile he was a high level lawyer for Verizon and stands to greatly benefit (along with his friends) when T-Mobile and Sprint merge as well as when Verizon Fios gets much more freedom to overcharge and segment Internet service instead of becoming a dumb pipe selling data throughput as a commodity. It is honestly perplexing he wouldn’t need to recuse himself.

In short, a partisan stooge with vested interest in the telecom and ISP industry is not a reasonable leader for our supposedly nonpartisan FCC. You can demand that everyone “civilly accept loss” but I really see no reason why that is helpful, a good idea, or even reasonable given the situation.

I wish it would be a serious issue in the 2020 campaign but, let’s be honest, America has plenty of other problems and it won’t even be a minor factor.

tldr: You should expect to be demonized when you transform an independent agency into a partisan hit job on poor people and the average consumer while enriching yourself, your former coworkers, and an army of lobbyists for the monopolistic telecom and ISP industries.