”5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.” –
“Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ’cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: ‘PRESIDENT TRUMP.’”
Michael Moore talking:
first of all, I take no pleasure in being right. I never wanted to be more wrong when I wrote that. But I had just come back from the U.K., where my last film, Where to Invade Next, had just opened, and so I went and did press throughout the U.K., in London, in Sheffield, ending up in Belfast, and a lot of crowds and theater screenings with the working class of the United Kingdom.
This was the week before Brexit, and I saw what I see and hear a lot in Michigan and Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and Ohio and elsewhere, where people didn’t necessarily like or were in love with the idea of Brexit, but they loved being able to have the chance to go into the voting booth and throw a Molotov cocktail into the middle of a system that had left them broke and in despair.
And when we left the U.K. there just before the vote, you know, we were all saying—my crew and friends—”Wow, this just sounds like many parts of the United States, and it looks like Brexit’s going to pass,” even though all the polls said that it wasn’t going to. We came back here, and of course all the polls—you know, Brexit did pass—and all the polls here were saying that Hillary had it in the bag.
There were people who were trying to warn everybody else to not treat this as a joke, to take Trump seriously. And so, I immediately started—I wrote that piece that you just referred to, and I went on Bill Maher, and I told the audience there that Trump was going to win, and he was going to win by winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the three states—electoral states that he won by. And I got booed. I got booed on Bill Maher. People did not want to hear it.
And I said, “Look, I’m not saying it because I want that to happen. I’m saying it that we’d better realize they’re having the Democratic convention this week, and they’re popping the champagne corks as if it’s a done deal.” Because everybody’s mindset then, throughout August and September and October, was that, “How could she lose, to this guy?” And, in fact, she won. She won by 3 million votes. So that part, people had right. But I just kept telling people, “Look, you’re not looking at the right picture here. You’re all liberal arts majors. You suck at math and geography. This is going to come down to the Electoral College. Are you counting this?”
Yes, in those popular vote polls, she was ahead, but that’s unfortunately not the way the president gets picked. And because the Democratic Party and others have led no fight to get rid of the Electoral College since President Gore won in 2000—you’d think, after that, people would go, “You know, this Electoral College, I think it’s time for it to go.” No.
Now, there have been good people who have got the national popular vote thing going, and they’ve got it passed in a lot of states. If you haven’t heard of this, go on NationalPopularVote.com. We have to get enough states to pass this law. The law says—can I go into this? Can I just explain this? The law says that if you pass the—in your state, that your state’s electors will go to whoever wins the popular vote. But we’ve got to get enough states where we get the 270 electoral votes. We’ve got enough states now that have passed this where we’re up to 172 electoral votes. So we just need enough states that have 98 electoral votes left, and then that’s that, and now the winner who actually wins the popular vote will be the president of the United States. So there’s a possibility of fixing this without having to go through the machinations of changing the Constitution.
So, to get back to what happened in the summer of ’16, I couldn’t get anywhere, and I couldn’t convince Democratic Party leadership types. I couldn’t get people who vote Democratic to listen to me. I started to feel that I must have communication skill issues, because somehow I’m not getting this through to people: “You’re not taking Trump seriously.”
– the blue states that that Obama had won, that you thought Trump was going to win. Ohio and Michigan.
And Pennsylvania, right. And I just couldn’t get anybody to listen. Nobody thought it could happen, because—”Are you kidding? He’s such an idiot. He’s crazy.” I said, “That’s why he’s going to win. You don’t understand. He’s an incredible performance artist.”
People love The Apprentice. I mean, people between the Hudson River and Interstate 5 love The Apprentice. They loved him on it, because here’s what he did every week. Whoever the biggest jerk was on the show that week got to hear, “You’re fired.” And everybody works with that jerk. Wherever you work, there’s that one jerk. And the cathartic feeling you got watching The Apprentice, of hearing somebody fire that jerk—people loved that show, and they loved Trump, and they loved hearing him say, “You’re fired.”
But I couldn’t get anybody to listen to this, because on the coasts, within the bubble, within the bubble of the Democratic Party infrastructure, they don’t watch The Apprentice. They also don’t watch The Bachelorette either, by the way, which is a great show. I’m just saying that I pay attention to what my fellow Americans are watching and listening to.
Gwen Stefani—this is what I have known from the beginning of this, is that Trump found out—he was in negotiations for re-upping The Apprentice with NBC, and he found out that Gwen Stefani, who is one of the stars of The Voice, another show you’re not watching
he found out that somebody else was getting paid more than him on NBC. And not just somebody else—can I say it?—a woman. A woman was being paid more than Donald J. Trump. And that, you know, makes him go—like this.
So, he decides that he’s going to show NBC. He contacts another network to put them in competition for each other for The Apprentice, and then he comes up with this idea of holding an announcement—not for real, just it’s going to be a pretend thing. He’s going to hold an announcement announcing he’s running for president, and he’s going to have a couple rallies, and he’s going to show these networks just how much the American people love him, out there in that vast, wide swath of land.
And so that’s the big plan. But then—so he comes down the escalator, makes the announcement and goes off the rails and starts calling Mexicans rapists and criminals and murderers and whatever else.
the people are cheering—people are cheering—if you’ve seen that escalator—I think, by now, most people have seen the escalator, coming down with Melania. The people cheering down there are extras, and he has paid extras $50 apiece to be there in Trump T-shirts and holding signs and all of that. It’s all fake. It’s all fake. It’s as fake as the gold-plated escalator he’s coming down. It’s gold-plated, folks; it’s not real gold. He comes down, he says this about Mexicans, and within days NBC fires him.
It goes completely against what he thinks is going to happen, and now they don’t want him at all, and now he’s lost his job because of his racism. And he’s already booked and paid for these two events. I believe one was in Phoenix and one was in Mobile, Alabama. And, you know, they’re paid for. They’ve rented the arenas or the auditoriums or whatever. And now, this is the part that I’m not privy to his conversations with Don Jr. and Eric, although I usually am, but not this one.
they decide, “We’ve already paid for it. Let’s go and do the rallies.” So they go and do the rallies. And we show in the film the look on Trump’s face. There’s 40,000 people in that stadium in Mobile, Alabama, and he cannot believe it. I mean, he’s never been in front of 40,000 people. He’s never had that experience, like you and I have.
But there is something when you stand on a stage and there’s a lot of people. OK, I’ll—it happened to me at the University of Florida. They changed me from the auditorium into the basketball arena. It had never happened before. And they were people just coming to hear me talk, and there’s 14,000 people in the arena. When you step on that stage and 14,000 people are cheering, you’re like, “Wow! I’m glad I didn’t listen to my guidance counselors.”
And so you see the look, though. I show the look in his face in my movie. You see the epiphany taking place in his head. It’s like, “Well, maybe running for president isn’t such a bad idea. To hell with NBC and The Apprentice.” And he decides to actually go ahead with it.
Remember early on where pundits and people were saying, “There’s no campaign apparatus. There’s nobody in charge. There’s no place—how do you donate to the campaign?” Right? It was all that, “He’s not really running. He’s not really wanting to do the job. This is just some kind of stunt.” I mean, it was kind of obvious to everybody. But I actually show how the stunt got launched.
And then we end up being the losers for it in the long run, because he decides he likes it. He loves these crowds, and they just keep getting bigger. And the rest is history.
Les Moonves, who was the head of CBS, and Jeff Zucker, who is the head of CNN, both kind of copped to the fact that they were putting him on the air a lot for free. He didn’t have to pay for any of this. It’s why Hillary—if you look at what she spent, she spent—well, he spent about $300,000—I’m sorry, $300 million. She spent almost a billion on her campaign. He didn’t have to spend a billion, because he got all this free airtime from the mainstream networks. And in the film, I show Moonves and Zucker yukking it up over how great it is that Donald Trump is running, because it was very good for business and they sold a lot more ads.
So Keith Ellison is on the Sunday morning show that George has on ABC. And Keith says, very seriously, “You know, you should take Trump seriously. He could end up leading the Republican Party ticket.” And George Stephanopoulos just starts laughing hysterically, and our good friend Katrina over at The Nation, she’s there on the panel. She’s laughing. I mean, everybody was laughing. People watching this show were probably laughing. I mean, nobody really took it seriously, because it just—that is not—”A lot of bad things can happen in this country; That is not going to happen.”
But a few people, like Keith Ellison, were trying to warn people, “You’ve got to take anybody seriously when they say something like this.” And I think now, after all this time, we realize that Donald Trump is always lying and he’s always telling the truth. And you have to be able to operate on both levels with him.
when he says, “I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it,” you know that he’s not going to shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue—I hope—but you know he could get away with it. I mean, both are true. And it’s always that way with him. So, I pay close attention to him when he says things that sound crazy and you think he’s just being crazy. I always go, “Well, you know, he may mean that.”
I mean, even in the film, when he says that about, “We’re not going to arm teachers”—you know, after Parkland, Florida—”We’re not going to arm teachers,” and then, within two seconds, he goes, “Well, maybe 20 percent of them.” And then, two seconds later, “It could be 40 percent. It could be all”—he just—it’s like he says one thing that could be the truth, but he switches it up within seconds. This happens all the time. He’ll switch something up the same day, or within a day or two.
Part of that process—and this is the evil genius of Trump—is that he knows how to keep, especially liberals, all scatterbrained and not knowing—”Well, what—what’s he—what’s going on? What? Wait a minute. He said that. But, no, he said that. No, he said that.” But we take people—when people say something, we take it literally. He knows he can just say stuff, get everybody discombobulated, and he becomes the master distractor. He knows how to get people off the topic and on to something else so that we won’t really be paying attention to what he’s really up to.
_____
Michael Moore
Academy Award-winning filmmaker. His new documentary, Fahrenheit 11/9, is out in theaters September 21.
— source democracynow.org | Sep 21, 2018