March 6, 2018--A Labyrinth With No Center

While continuing to root around looking for more insight about why and how Donald Trump managed to get elected president of the United States, in David Frum's Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic, I came across this posting from last February from the 4chan bulletin board. It is one of the venues the alt-right used to slink into existence--

Since these men [Trump supporters], like Trump, wear their insecurities on their sleeve, they fling insults in wild rabid bursts at everyone else. 

Trump the loser, the outsider, the hot mess, the pathetic joke, embodies this duality. Trump represents both the alpha and the beta. He is a successful person who, as the left often notes, is also the exact opposite--a grotesque loser, sensitive and prideful about outsider status, ready at the drop of a hat to go on the attack, self-obsessed, selfish, abrogating, unquestioning of his own mansplaining and spreading, so insecure that he must brag about assaulting women . . . . 

But what the left doesn't realize is that this is not a problem for Trump's younger supporters--rather it's the reason why they support him. [My emphasis] 

Trump supporters voted for the con-man, the labyrinth with no center, because the labyrinth with no center is how they feel the world works around them. A labyrinth with no center is how they feel , how they feel the world works around them. A labyrinth with no center is a perfect description of their mother's basement with a terminal to an endless array of escapist fantasy worlds. 

Trump's bizarre, inconsistent, incompetent, embarrassing, ridiculous behavior--what the left (naturally) perceives as his weaknesses--are to his supporters his strengths. . . .
Trump is loserdom embraced. Trump is the loser who has won.

This was written and posted by Dale Beran who writes about how the Internet shapes politics.