American here! Its because this is all rhetoric for the idiots that follow him. He doesn’t care if Europeans see him as an idiot, he cares that the idiots here see him as big brained. And the rubes eat up anything that has “free speech” in it because they generally interpret that as “its OK to be racist and misogynistic, its my right because freedoms!”

Hope this helped explain.

And probably also explains why I want to leave.