I will never believe the whole thing (Trump) didn't start out as a joke like Boaty McBoatface, which was so preposterous, so bonkers that it went viral and a bunch of out of touch idiots didn't get the humor and took out all as a serious movement and then made it one. I think it's mass delusion.
It was a coordinated sci ops. The_donald popped up practically overnight and pushed its way to the top of Reddit as a "joke" subreddit and it gradually got worse from there.
It has to be just meme fuckery. It had to be. He was the most unserious candidate ever. He fucking asked a geopolitical rival for help hacking our institutions of democracy on live fucking tv! He's a fucking joke candidate followed by people who don't even know they got played by Trump and 4chan and this Q chucklefuck. Trump is supported by a Batman villain with a fucking Nixon tattoo. This is comedy. This is farce! Well fucking played, assholes. You got us. You got us fucking good.
And these morons with room temperature IQs are so fucking illiterate that they are incapable of recognizing the rank irony. Fuck even Trump, on the eve of his election victory, you could see it on his face - he was thinking "what have you stupid motherfuckers done? I just wanted to drum up the name recognition and net worth!"
That ignores people's very real anxiety over wage stagnation, inflation on food and housing, and a health care system that is functionally broken. Normally we would just start a war somewhere and direct that energy towards brown people halfway around the world. With no war, it's being directed at 'others' domestically.
The culture wars are an outward expression of the anxiety and fear they live with because their economic destiny has been derailed and the value of their labor has been stolen from them. They're lashing out because they're unhappy and they're unhappy because they've been screwed. They're just too indoctrinated to see that we have all been screwed together.
They want to be on top. That's their belief. Don't try to make sense of anything, because most of their complaints are just "waaahh! I want this smelly old fatass to be president!" That's it.