'Michael Moore in Trumpland' Isn't About Donald Trump. It's About Hope.
Yesterday afternoon, news broke that exactly three weeks before Election Day, Michael Moore was releasing a surprise film, Michael Moore in Trumpland. In an election season without Jon Stewart, where the late-night hosts who manage to secure interviews with Donald Trump coddle him, the collective excitement seemed to say: This is it. This is our Trump reckoning.
Yet, Michael Moore in Trumpland was not about Donald Trump.
Michael Moore in Trumpland turned out to be edited footage of solo shows Moore hosted on October 6 and 7 in Wilmington, Ohio, at the Murphy Theatre, a nearly 800-seat venue financially backed by conservative political commenter Glenn Beck (who endorsed Hillary Clinton for president a few days after filming). Moore said in a post-screening Q&A that in his estimation, half the crowd members were supporting Clinton, while the other half constituted Trump voters, undecided voters, former Bernie Sanders supporters, and those inclined to vote third party.
"What the country doesn't need is to be told that Trump is a crazy and dangerous psychopath, sociopath, all of that," Moore said while introducing the film. "I think he has written and produced that movie, and it appears daily." In the election's final days, Moore is here to talk about Clinton, to get you excited about voting for Clinton, someone he has never voted for (he supported Sanders in his home state of Michigan's primary, and Barack Obama in 2008), despite a line in his 1996 book Downsize This! that reads, "Hillary Rodham is one hot shitkickin' feminist babe."
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Instead of bombast and vitriol, Moore addresses his Ohio audience with softness and gentility, vowing to make them feel comfortable despite the partisan backdrop. He achieves this through disarming humor, forcing the theater's Hispanic ushers to sit behind a faux brick wall and dispatching a drone to spy on the section where he has seated the Muslim attendees. He offers simple, hilarious solutions to some of the right's strongest criticisms, like, "If you don't support gay marriage, don't get gay married." Anticipating the question that concluded the second presidential debate, Moore calls on members of the audience to say nice things about Clinton, but only after he gives three compliments to George W. Bush (he did a good job raising his daughters, he allocated millions in AIDS relief to Africa, and he really loves his dogs). To counter older white male fears of electing a female president after a black president, he jokes that the country is on track for eight years of a gay president, then a transgender president, then a PETA-supporting president, then a hamster president.
Before getting specific about reasons to support Clinton, Moore advocates for female leadership in general. "Not a single one of these school shootings are girls, are they?" he asks, enumerating how men vastly outnumber women as criminals. He airs an imagined news clip from January 2017, illustrating the destruction that would result if "the human Molotov cocktail" were elected president. Still, Moore is sympathetic to Trump voters, who feel like they've been on the receiving end of non-stop disappointments from the economy and the healthcare system.
"What the country doesn't need is to be told that Trump is a crazy and dangerous psychopath. He has written and produced that movie, and it appears daily."
Although Moore has qualms with Clinton, ranging from her vote on the Iraq War to her chumminess with Wall Street, Moore dismantles criticisms against her-likability, trustworthiness, etc.-one by one. People in the Ohio theater cry and stand up to applaud when Moore explains that in the last two decades, 1 million Americans died due to poor health insurance, a loss Moore defines as terrorism.
Moore wants voters to be hopeful, like they were when voting for Obama in 2008, even going out on a limb to say that Clinton might be like Pope Francis-she may get into office and immediately begin signing progressive executive orders for the common good. But if Clinton doesn't prove herself within her first two years as commander-in-chief, Moore says-in a declaration that semi-cheapens his overall message-he will enter the presidential race for 2020, campaigning with Kanye West on a platform of free HBO for everyone and two joints delivered to your door every Friday, in a nation where only women can own guns.
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During the Q&A, Moore implored Clinton voters (probably those who write forSaturday Night Live in particular) to proceed with caution through November 8: "If you support Hillary Clinton and you've been doing this end zone dance and celebrating her early victory, you've been helping to defeat her... I've lived long enough to see Richard Nixon elected in this country, an actor whose co-star was a chimpanzee, W. after he got us into the war. There's a long tradition of Americans electing people who you don't think they're going to elect." Polling guarantees nothing, he stresses. Better to draw no early conclusions and get out the vote (Moore is working with theaters who want to screen the film outside of New York and Los Angeles, and he plans to make it available for viewers to stream from home).
To Moore, November 8 is not about choosing the lesser of two evils. Americans have the opportunity to make history for the second time in eight years. On the final electoral map of 2016, Moore hopes to see 50 blue states.
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