Why Does Donald Trump Keep Defending Right-Wingers' Alleged Enemies?

Re: Kim Jong Il

It’s amazing that a young guy would go and take over. You know, you would have thought that these tough generals would say no way this is going to happen when the father died. So he has got to have something going for him because he kept control which is amazing for a young person to do.

  Real Clear Politics

Re: Vladimir Putin

"He's running his country and at least he's a leader, unlike what we have in this country," Trump said when asked by "Morning Joe" Republican host Joe Scarborough about Putin's alleged killing of journalists and political opponents.

  CNN

In 2000, James Kuklinski and other political scientists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign established an important distinction: American citizens with incorrect information can be divided into two groups, the misinformed and the uninformed. The difference between the two is stark. [...] As Kuklinski and his colleagues established, in the U.S., the most misinformed citizens tend to be the most confident in their views and are also the strongest partisans. These folks fill the gaps in their knowledge base by using their existing belief systems. Once these inferences are stored into memory, they become “indistinguishable from hard data,” Kuklinski and his colleagues found.

[...]

Furthermore, in 2010, political scientists Brendan Nyhan1 and Jason Reifler2 found that when misinformed citizens are told that their facts are wrong, they often cling to their opinions even more strongly with what is known as defensive processing, or the “backfire effect.”

Strong partisans are more likely to participate in the primary process, making it also likely that at least some highly engaged primary voters are also confidently misinformed and unwilling to accept contradictory evidence.

Telltale signs of misinformation, for example, were on display in a focus group of Trump supporters run by Republican media consultant Frank Luntz. Not only did negative information about Trump that was presented by Luntz to the group strengthen support for the candidate, participants held on more confidently to their misinformation as the session progressed.

[...]

New work by Jennifer Hochschild of Harvard and Katherine Levine Einstein of Boston University found that there are incentives for politicians to keep citizens both misinformed and politically active. [...] Hochschild and Einstein remind us that people find psychological comfort in having their opinions validated by others, especially by elites. So, there are many cases in which it makes more sense for politicians to encourage people to stay misinformed rather than try to provide them with accurate information.

  FiveThirtyEightPolitics

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

They won't find out.  And even if they did, they would deny it was true.