As Donald Trump’s economic policies start to take hold, with the price of eggs going up and the stock market tanking, we’re going to be hearing more and more desperate attempts of Republicans and Trump supporters to justify what is going on. So, we have people like Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, in a recent interview on Fox Business Network, suggesting that previous market levels might have been inflated. 

We were probably over-bloated with the stock market here for a while. We went up quite a bit.

Are you effing serious?

The cognitive dissonance is going to be ratcheting up by the day, as people who really believe that Trump is this great  businessman who plays mental chess while the rest of the world plays checkers discover that Trump is actually a moron. An excellent salesman, but a moron nonetheless. 

It’s not just the economy. As Trump jettison’s European allies and makes his bed with Vladimir Putin (once again), you may hear Trump defenders claim that the Eureopeans need to spend more on their own defense. But they are, in fact, already spending more on their own defense. As reported in the Atlantic:

You’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain. This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. Shortly before his jibe, the vice president gave a speech in Munich in which he championed Europe’s pro-Russian parties of the far right and far left. Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.

Or, some conservatives have justified Trump’s support of Russia as actually a grand strategy to counter China. Again, from the Atlantic:

That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

Or, Republicans have tried to explain Trump’s anti-Canada economic warfare as an anti-drug policy, a response to the flow of fentanyl south across the Canadian border. Again, from the Atlantic:

The fentanyl claim was almost immediately exposed as fiction. And if stopping a narcotics flow was the goal, why would the president demand annexation of Canada or parts of Canada? Trump aides have spoken of ejecting Canada from intelligence-sharing agreements, which again is not what you’d do if your goal were to improve cross-border drug enforcement. Maybe Trump’s 51st-state talk is not to be taken literally, but if taken seriously, the message is unmistakable: these are expressions motivated by animus against Canadian sovereignty, not a wish for improved U.S.-Canada cooperation.

I have been arguing since Day #1 that this election was not about the price of eggs, or the economy. It was about half the country wanting to be led by an unreconstructed asshole, who would punish all the people they have come to hate. But he is, of course, going to punish all of his own supporters as well. It’s a circular firing squad. That will make the cognitive dissonance — the belief that “I’m a smart person who had good reasons to vote for Trump” — start to collide with the dawning recognition that they’ve been had by this malignant narcissist, and that (at least when it comes to politics) these people are not smart at all.