Michael Moore is still reeling at the news of Donald Trump’s presidential victory. Who can blame him? There is integrity, even heroism, in this outright refusal to come to terms with it, to normalise it in his mind. That custard pie in America’s face landed on 9 November 2016 – 11/9. The date gives Moore a cute numerical reversal of his great movie from 2004, Fahrenheit 9/11, and that’s still a documentary that must be respected for calling it right on the war on terror, long before disbelieving in WMD became a bland article of faith among precisely those critics who disparaged Moore’s film at the time.
Moore’s understandable rage and bewilderment perhaps account for the flaws in this vehement but incoherent film. It restates bits and pieces of all the great polemic he’s given us over the last 20 years – guns, corporate mendacity, community betrayal, beltway culpability – and actually repeats his opening line from Fahrenheit 9/11. “Did we dream it?” he moans, to nightmarishly vivid TV footage of Hillary Clinton preparing for her coronation in 2016, like Al Gore in 2000. But Moore never quite settles on a single, compelling riposte to Trump, never really hones his arguments to a piercing arrowhead of counterattack. Instead, he rambles over almost everything … entertainingly, but confusingly, ending on an image of Parkland School shooting survivor Emma González.
First, he has to admit to fraternising with the enemy, in the days when Trump was just an unthreatening media joke. Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner organised a launch party for one of his movies, and Fahrenheit 9/11’s VHS release in the US appears to have been managed by the grisly Steve Bannon, that dabbler in film production and distribution. And affecting to admire Moore became fashionable in the Trump camp, if only to discomfit Jeb Bush. Had he dwelt on this subject, Moore might even have wondered if the Trump-ites were effectively inhaling some of the Michael Moore spirit, mobilising for their own ends the outlaw scepticism that Moore did so much to encourage. It’s as if they took his trademark cap – and slapped the Make America Great Again logo on it.
This film’s strongest section shows him going back to his roots in Flint, Michigan. Moore is passionately angry at the way Michigan’s Republican governor Rick Snyder poisoned the water supply for Flint’s working-class communities in 2014, by insisting on a new, pointless pipeline for no reason other than to enrich his corporate cronies; Moore is of course angry at Snyder’s admirer Donald Trump, crucially emboldened by Snyder’s banditry, but also angry at President Barack Obama, for Obama’s failure to do anything to help while in office, and for fobbing off the residents with a dismayingly supercilious and patronising speech. Maybe the whole film should just have been about this. That Obama speech was indeed a shocker. Yet attacking Obama now feels like such a futile and self-harming thing for Moore to do.
Moore then moves on to Bernie Sanders, mightily messed about by the Democratic hierarchy, which conjured “superdelegates” to keep his name off the ticket. They assumed Sanders was unelectable. Trump’s victory makes that assumption look glib, and the Sanders presidency is now one of the great what-ifs of modern times. But Moore gives us post-Sanders signs of hope, by crying up the new wave of grassroots activism, as epitomised by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the fiercely intelligent and undaunted socialist congressional winner from the Bronx. Ocasio-Cortez and other bold activists are showing America the way. But Moore slightly clouds that issue, too, by noting mournfully that the electoral college system is rigged against them.
Then there is the question of the media, authentic news, and the queasy intimations of fascism. Trump incessantly attacks what Goebbels called the Lügenpresse, the lying press (although Moore is himself not above denigrating the poor old New York Times for misrepresenting Sanders’ fanbase), and, in his most studiedly outrageous provocation, Moore gives us a clip of Hitler with Trump dubbed over it. It leads to an interesting interview with Timothy Snyder, the historian and author of On Tyranny. But there again, Moore hits a false note. He talks about Hitler and his followers setting fire to the Reichstag to create a spurious crisis that would legitimise their seizure of power. Then he comes worryingly close to implying that 9/11 was the same thing. “Truther” conspiracy? Something else that isn’t helping the fight against Trump.
So, to quote Lenin: what is to be done? I think it will take some time for the penny to drop about Trump not creating a single new job in America. Moore tells us to keep the faith, keep fighting the good fight. That message is just about discernible in the fog of pain.
