Stop it with the sugarcoating. He’s a fascist, a Nazi. He promises to inflict pain on others, and that’s what’s appealing to half of American voters. Not the “confidence”. They get off on the hate and cruelty, whether they admit it or not. They are, in every literal sense of the word, textbook fascists. No need to make excuses for them.
Oh they definitely exist. At a high level the bullshit is driven by malicious greed, but there are also people who are naive and ignorant and hopeful enough to hear that drivel and truly believe in it.
Like when Microsoft shoves GPT4 into notepad.exe. Obviously a terrible terrible product from a UX/CX perspective. But also, extremely expensive for Microsoft right? They don’t gain anything by stuffing their products with useless annoying features that eat expensive cloud compute like a kid eats candy. That only happens because their management people truly believe, honest to god, that this is a sound business strategy, which would only be the case if they are completely misunderstanding what GPT4 is and could be and actually think that future improvements would be so great that there is a path to mass monetization somehow.