This reminds me of master persuader Scott Adams mentioned about "cognitive dissonance"[1] on some of his recent tweets.
https://www.amazon.com/How-Fail-Almost-Everything-Still-eboo...
The one thing to take away from this election is that persuasion trumps everything else. It's scary and crazy!
I followed his arguments in the primaries and found them somewhat compelling, the idea that Trump was in better shape than people thought. But he's lately gone of the rails totally and completely.
And more to the point of this post, he completely misuses the phrase cognitive dissonance, having apparently defined it to mean something like "a way to tell people who disagree with me they don't know what they're talking about" rather than an actual psychological characteristic.