He’s been sold on a fundamentally holistic view of the economy. “This may be uncomfortable now, but I trust it will produce a large national windfall in the future”.

It isn’t a bad attitude to have on its face. People do need to accept certain short term discomforts in order to achieve long term economic benefits, whether that means working industrial jobs to produce new useful infrastructure or risking personal health/safety in military conflicts to establish national security or curbing consumption to avoid long term ecological harm.

But the mass media this guy is ingesting is bullshit. So the benign “we’re investing in the future” perspective is corrupted into a gullible “my local neighborhood wallet inspector is just helping to remove these counterfeit bills from the money supply” political apathy.

He’s the victim of an intense, industrial scale propaganda campaign.

Incidentally…

Trump could cut this guy’s nuts off and he’d still find a way to put a positive spin on it

There is a precedent.