I’ve known this guy for a long time. He’s grown up in rural America so he has all the same reasons for supporting Trump as those people typically do with the added oddity of being more impacted by the negative outcomes of those policies. Guns, immigration, general economic stuff. At least those are the reasons they’ll state publicly.
It seems more like an in-group thing than anything else to me. I would have expected some sort of expression of disagreement with Trump on this particular issue but he says he thinks Democrats will do the same thing despite all evidence to the contrary. That is how he’s chosen to rationalize the situation.
You’re assuming they give a shit what you think about their actions. I don’t think that’s true at all. We’ve been in the “what are you going to do about it” phase of authoritarianism for a while now.