If you want to know what Donald Trump is all about, he’s about the revenge on the revenge of the nerds. Back in the good old days, nerds were the subjects of insults and bullying in middle school and high school. The nerds had to grin and bear it with the hope that social ostracism in high school would be compensated for by success as an adult. Before the revenge of the nerds, one didn’t have to be a nerd to earn a decent living after high school if one had a strong back and showed up for work on time. You might not be as well off as the nerd who went on to college and moved to the big city, but you could make a comfortable life for yourself.
Then came the revenge of the nerds as the new economy created nerd billionaires like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Some nerds were even cool. It was the zeitgeist of the 1980s with all those the nerd revenge movies, some direct, some more subtle. Automation was already hollowing out the manufacturing cities, but the coup de grace was the Reagan years with their union busting and worship of dog-eat-dog capitalism. The non-nerds were in the lead voting for this, but they were the ones who got clobbered. In contrast, the nerds were doing fine in their Silicon Valleys, la-di-da universities and running the financial sector. That was the revenge of the nerds. All they had to do was survive high school to win.
Now we've got the revenge against the revenge of the nerds. Trump voters were the non-nerds in school, the popular sorts who used to run things before the nerds took over. If you listen to the typical Trump voter rant, they are the ones who were left behind. It really rankles. They might not be Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, but they used to get a consolation prize, a decent job. Now they get nothing. The revenge of the nerds left nothing behind but the scorched earth of minimum wage jobs and not enough hours. Worse, the nerds kept reminding them that they brought their problems on themselves. No one likes that. No one.
Donald Trump is about Douglas Neidermeyer or Stan Gable finally punching John Blutarsky or Lewis Skolnick in the gut, the way a real man would.