Fired Trumpers Struggle with Cognitive Dissonance

Trump supporters fired by DOGE cope with the cognitive dissonance by claiming that they still support "efficiency" -- but just, not like this.

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In what’s quickly becoming a trope, Trump supporters who have been fired by the possibly illegal “DOGE” purge are coping with the cognitive dissonance when faced with the reality of what they voted for by claiming that they still support “government efficiency” but just —- not the method.

There are so many of them that CNN did a piece yesterday titled, “They voted for Trump in 2024. Months later, his administration fired them.”

And this piece is rich with cope.

Graugnard is among many federal workers who lost their jobs three months after casting their ballot for Trump. Former federal employees told CNN they believed Trump’s policies aligned with their values and would improve their lives, but now they have been left scrambling to find work.

Graugnard told CNN he doesn’t regret voting for Trump because he supports government efficiency, but he “didn’t vote for it to be implemented the way it’s being implemented.”

He thinks he voted for government “efficiency” to be done in a “technocratic” and “rational” manner, but this is not how it’s gone down, you see.

“I voted confidently with the intent that it was going to be done in a way that was technocratic and efficient and a bit more rational, and that’s not what happened,” Graugnard said.

We are seeing a lot of this. We even have Republicans on TV defending Trump’s chaotic destruction of the U.S. government via his pet missile Elon Musk — by agreeing with the supposed intent, but disagreeing with the method.

Big Lie

No one who has working brain cells and paid attention during his first term would think their vote for Trump was a vote for any policy to be carried out “rationally.”

“Technocratically” is “characterized by the government or control of society or industry by an elite of technical experts.” Did the Trump supporter not understand that Elon Musk is an “elite technical expert” according to his own mythology?

If he voted for technocratic, he got it. This is it, my dude!

Now maybe can he see why thinking people had a problem with the idea of technocrats running the government.

Did Musk’s destruction of Twitter not signal that he is very bad at managing and didn’t actually understand the purpose of engineers he fired until after he’d fired them, and he remains unable to learn from others’ experiences and so he must reinvent every wheel and as it turns out… he’s not so great at invention after all.

What Musk is really good at is marketing.

A trait he shares with his master Donald Trump. The marketing is selling theft as “efficiency.”

Efficient, You Say?

It turns out, the government isn’t very efficient. This is in part because the government is not meant to be efficient.