One of the rhetorically effective things about his campaign messaging was how broad and vague it was. Pundits, podcasters, influencers, and those manipulating the algorithms of social media, took that messaging, isolated parts of it and recontextualized those parts for specific audiences.

So while he may have assumed he was being very clear about what he was going to do, the messaging many of his voters got was totally detached from his intentions.

A good example of this is people who thought that the tariffs would somehow be a tax levied on foreign countries, not a sales tax on imported goods. Or those who thought the tariffs would be targeted at specific goods categories to benefit their particular industry, not a blanket tariff that impacts their upstream supply chain.

He told his subordinate on the campaign to get voters to vote for him, he assumed that meant convince them he was right, but that was impossible, the only ones that could get him the numbers he liked were the ones who just twisted what he said till people agreed with it.