Filmmaker Michael Moore said he accurately predicted Donald Trump’s victory months ago thanks to at least one key reason: “I am Trump’s demographic.”
“I’m an angry white guy over the age of 35 and I have just a high school education. So I grew up with, I lived with, I still live with,” Moore told MSNBC this morning.
Shortly before Election Day he released Michael Moore in Trumpland, a concert film from two nights of stand-up appearances in Trump-friendly Wilmington, Ohio.
“I take no pleasure in having called this five months ago. So I don’t want to hear that, really,” Moore said, relating a segment on the network where panelists had made fun of the Trump campaign expense report showing the largest expenditure on red hats. “…We wear ball caps. We, to borrow the Dylan line, the country I come from is called the Midwest. This Middle America thing — and the reason why they have this anger toward the media, this kind of elitist thing… that was laughable that they weren’t spending money on getting new polls or doing — ‘they have no ground game.’ ‘They have no ground game.’ Are you kidding me?”
“First of all, the ground game has occurred over the last 30 years and this did not turn people into Republicans, because it started under Ronald Reagan in Flint, in Detroit, where people lost tens of thousands of jobs, and their lives were decimated and they were kicked out of the middle class and when Reagan fired the air traffic controllers and other unions didn’t stand up and say anything or do anything, that was the end right there. And it just got worse and worse and worse for working people,” he explained.
Moore stressed that election analysts are oddly “confused about Michigan and Wisconsin” slipping away from Hillary Clinton.
“Bernie won Michigan and Wisconsin. We saw this back in March. Hillary was ahead by 8 to 20 points on the day of the primary and 12 hours later she loses in Michigan. And that was a huge red flag,” he said. “The other red flag was that there were 130,000 more people who voted on the Republican ballot that day in Michigan than the Democratic ballot in a Democratic state. 130,000 more Republicans voted. And the media completely ignored this. It’s like they didn’t see what was happening.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) success alone — 22 state wins — should have signaled that the general election would remain a “change” election, he stressed.
“How else can you explain a socialist? This is not a socialist country. How did a socialist win 22 states? Because people didn’t care about the label. Just as people didn’t care about — here’s the other thing too,” Moore said. “All of the talk that you guys and others have done about Trump, ‘he won’t reveal his taxes.’ Then it was, he paid no taxes. Do you understand that people who are struggling from paycheck to paycheck admire … they sit there trying to not pay the government anything, and the fact that there is a guy — and when he went into the microphone during the debate, ‘it’s because I’m smart.’ And people are going back, yes, dude.”
The administration’s lackluster response to the Flint water crisis, the filmmaker added, likely depressed African-American turnout. “The pipes still haven’t been replaced… the water’s still poisoned.”
Moore noted that “90,000 Michiganders voted for every office and every ballot proposal on both sides of the ballot and refused to vote for the president.”
“They couldn’t vote for Trump. They knew that was wrong,” he added. “But they were not going to participate in what they saw as a system that had left them forgotten and at bay, and that was the end of that for Flint and Detroit and the state of Michigan.”
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