This is pretty typical though. The average person consumes news but doesn't retain anything in the long-term other than some vague ideas and the feelings those ideas evoke. This sort of free-form association of vague ideas to knee-jerk positive or negative feelings is how elections have always been won or lost, and how political figures have always lived or died. "I feel like I could have a beer with him." "He's so authentic." "He's a liar, look at all the things he's lied about." "He ruined my healthcare."
These things may be true or false. A politician can be authentic and likeable. They can lie (of course). They can have tangible negative effects on policy. If people tell you that they like or dislike a public figure they are probably basing it on things they've actually heard or read in the media. It's just that all those stultifying details get elided into an amorphous recollection of feelings.
Example: a person hears a lot of bad press about Hillary's email server. They hear some of the technical details, which they may not fully comprehend, they hear experts weighing in and either defending or damning her. There are daily developments about an ongoing FBI investigation; now it's over and she's cleared, but there are skeptics; now it's open again. This drumbeat turns into a very simple refrain in their mind, now mocked: "her emails." A miasma that feels like corruption settles over her public image. The average voter can't tell you exactly what it means to have kept private emails, what the emails were, what the investigation found, how or why any of it happened. They just know she did something bad with emails. And it had something to do with classified info?
Now, whether this person decides to be swayed by all of that depends mostly on the premises and prejudices they've brought to the table long before anyone associated the name "Hillary" with the word "email." Stuff like this has more of a galvanizing effect, to either keep the lying you-know-what out of power, or circle the wagons and defend her from the slings and arrows of criticism. But even if you like her... you gotta admit that it all smells kind of funny.
This is what's really killing Trump's presidency, by the way, whether he's removed from office or not - this is surely the end of Drumpf! - because we hear so much bad press about Trump doing shady things with Russia. Every day, some new scandal branches from the tree, people in his orbit having secret meetings, secret phone calls, lying to congress. People get fired and DC about blows up. Officials change their stories in suspicious ways. Trump rages and fumes impotently. Trump tells Putin things he shouldn't. And something about Russians hacking our election? Why isn't anyone doing anything about that? It sure feels like scandal to me. How about you? You can be agnostic or even atheist on the question of Trump's involvement with Russia, but that feeling, persistent and omnipresent, can't be so easily shrugged away. He just feels dirty. All but the truest of true believers start to understand it. Even if they can't recite the details. Even if they still support him. Trump himself understands it, the fucking stupid reptile, he gets it on a reptilian level. A cloud hangs over his presidency.
I'm getting side-tracked. This mechanism happens with positive attitudes too. Ask the average person whether Kennedy was a good president. Odds are they'll tell you yes, absolutely. But whatever their answer, go ahead and ask why they feel that way. You'll probably get embarrassing stutters just like this video. Maybe a name-drop of Bay of Pigs or the Cuban Missile Crisis if they watch a lot of History channel during the non-"Pawn Stars" moments. The truth is that there are a lot of reasons to admire Kennedy, which we've learned through cultural osmosis, but what we recall is the feeling.
The man in this video watches a lot of pro-Trump news. He reads sites like the Daily Caller, he watches Fox, he sees image macros on Facebook about the turnaround in the jobs market. Every minor accomplishment and feel-good piece of legislation which would pass under any combination of President and Congress, to this man get heralded as earth-shaking changes, possible only through Trump's signature deal-making - Trump, the salesman to make Mephistopholes weep. Every time Trump signs a toothless executive order, every time he gives a grandstanding rally, every time he travels abroad to humiliate us all with his baffling ignorance... this dude gets informed that Trump has notched yet another major victory. He can't remember any of them after hearing about them, because they're not real victories and they didn't really change anything... but it sure feels like they did. It feels like Trump is giving them hell.