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    Michael Moore on how Harris-Walz can defeat Trump: ‘Do weird and cringe until the debate, then nail him’

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    With Joe Biden looking for re-election Democrats feared they were looking at an electoral catastrophe. Now, with Biden dropping out and Vice-President Kamala Harris at the top of the ticket, it suddenly feels like it is Donald Trump who is staring at possible defeat.The liberal film-maker and Democratic whisperer Michael Moore says he’s more optimistic than he has ever been since Trump stepped on to the escalator in Trump Tower to announce his first run for the presidency eight years ago.“This isn’t just a sugar-high or what [recovering] heroin addicts call a pink cloud,” Moore says. “It was so depressing for so many weeks and then it was instantly not depressing. I am hopeful now but it’s ours to blow – and we have a history of blowing it.”Moore, 70, has in recent years become something of an electoral sage. He predicted Donald Trump’s victory in 2016, in part because of the sense of political-cultural superiority Democrats emanated and because he had noticed that the campaign was fearful of inspiring Maga supporters. He predicted, too, that Democrats would buck the trend and be fine in the 2022 midterms.In this election cycle he is in some ways in line with the pollster Nate Silver, who recently said that “the strategy of the Harris campaign should be to triangulate the strategy of Hillary 2016, the Harris 2020 primary campaign, and Biden 2024, and do the exact opposite.”But Moore says he understands why Democrats are nervous that the Harris-Walz ticket could come apart, though it shows no current signs of doing so, particularly if Harris gets tarred with Biden’s unpopular “Bidenomics” or responsibility for his full-throated support of Israel’s war in Gaza.“Biden, sadly, is going to be remembered for funding the war in Gaza and providing the armaments to Netanyahu, not arms for protecting Israel, but extra money to kill Palestinian civilians,” Moore says. He remains “saddened and surprised” that Biden, who had refused to meet Netanyahu last September, flew to Tel Aviv after the 7 October Hamas cross-border attack and hugged him.“You can say what’s in a hug?” he says. “But ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Neville Chamberlain to you. It doesn’t take much for history to see that in the moment you needed to display courage you did the opposite.”But he’s cautiously optimistic that Harris is signaling a change of direction. She did not pick as expected the Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, who had harshly called out student protesters against the war in Gaza and settled a former employee’s claim that she was sexually harassed by a senior aide.Harris, he applauds, went against the conventional wisdom, upending the predictions of many TV pundits, and chose “this guy from the midwest, a football coach who had offered to be adviser to the gay student group. It’s pretty stunning.”And while as vice-president Harris has no power to speak against Biden on Israel, Harris has made her feelings plain. She declined to sit in on Netanyahu’s address to Congress, which echoed Pope Urban II’s 1095 call for the first crusade, instead traveling to a Zeta Phi Beta sorority meeting in Indianapolis.“Couldn’t they have made up something that sounded important with foreign policy attached to it? No, She’s busy at a sorority meeting … and she refused the traditional diplomatic “grip-and-grin” after meeting with Netanyahu. It was very public.”The first days of the Harris-Walz ticket have shown precisely the change of direction that Moore has argued for. The ominous but complicated “threat to democracy” anti-Trump platform has been dropped for “threat to freedom”. Trump’s folk story confabulations resist fact-checking, so that’s been refined to a kind of medieval textual charm, “weird”.Jibes over JD Vance’s “couch capers” and eyeliner discussions work in much the same way. What Harris-Walz are doing is much as Moore advocated when he offered the Clinton campaign “satirical support” to come up with lines that would get under Trump’s thin skin, especially in a televised debate.“I think I’m going to see what I was hoping for for eight years,” he says. “Once anybody gets under that thin skin anything can happen. On live TV? Trump could explode, start talking like a 12-year-old, though no offense to 12-year-olds, or get up and leave.”But didn’t Democrats bet on the Biden-Trump debate being a success? And the Trump prosecution in New York? The Republican candidate’s polling and fundraising went up after both.“It’s a holding pattern until she gets on that stage with him. I understand why people are nervous it might be a sugar high but Harris and Walz are people of substance. They’re being slow and cautious enough to get it together. It’s just been a couple of weeks. They are going to have to tell us what they’re going to do and hopefully come up with the right thing. And there will be mistakes.”As the Harris-Walz campaign “humanize” the ticket it is clear that the November election represents, on the Democratic side, a generational shift.“I’m so happy to hear Gen Z and X are over half the vote because it’s called facts and data,” Moore says, pointing out that the number of boomers over 65 who have died since 2016 is exceeded by Gen Z and millennials who have become eligible to vote. “How many of them do you think are going around in hats saying Make America Great Again”? They’ve never known it to be “great”, let alone “again”.“It’s not just a cultural shift – it’s a generational shift. The boomers may not be the No 1 voters in this election. And that’s why Gaza is so important. Young people hate war and they’re totally against Biden and his support of the war.” Harris, he says, needs to tap into “affordable housing, student debt, peace and the dying planet”.His prescription? “Do weird and cringe until the debate and then nail him,” Moore said. “But nail him with irony, satire and a simple way to point out the beyond weird absolute idiocy and insanity of what these two men are talking about. Reach them on a commonsense level so it doesn’t matter if you’re Democrat or Republican.” More

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      Will Biden’s loss of celebrity support make a real difference?

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      The last two US presidential election cycles haven’t been especially notable in the already-marginal world of celebrity endorsements. Both 2016 and 2020 pitted a well-established Democrat with heavy ties to previous administrations against a fringe-gone-mainstream Republican candidate whose own previous occupation was as a celebrity, and not a particularly hip one. So it wasn’t surprising to see an even more dramatic divide between mainstream celebs endorsing the Democrat (or saying nothing more controversial than a bland “vote!”) and a bunch of C- and-D-listers stumping for Trump, as they might any number of faulty late-night infomercial products.This might well have gone similarly in 2024, if not for Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in the first presidential debate a few weeks ago. Now a less lopsided divide has formed as a form of anti-endorsement has come in: celebrities who have called upon Joe Biden to step aside from the presidential race and let a younger candidate attempt to take the Democrats across the finish line.At first, it was an interestingly eclectic group, notable for aligning the likes of Michael Moore – who isn’t exactly the core constituency for a career politician fixated on bipartisan cooperation in the first place – with the likes of classic limousine liberals like Rob Reiner and Stephen King. This suggested some real traction to the idea that Biden should drop out, but was still largely limited to figures who seem a bit more likely to hop on social media and fire off some opinions. More writers than actors, in other words; same goes for figures with mock-pundit experience, like Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart. So there was particular headline-news grabbiness when George Clooney – who recently attended a Biden fundraiser – wrote a New York Times op-ed saluting the man’s service and integrity while also arguing that it was time for Joe to go. It may be the most talked-about celeb endorsement (or anti-endorsement) since Taylor Swift came out for Biden (and, probably more importantly, against Trump) shortly before the 2020 election. It even prompted a Biden response, with the president claiming – somewhat nonsensically – that Clooney, only being at the fundraiser he referred to for a brief period, couldn’t have gotten a proper impression of the president’s acuity.View image in fullscreenThough he doesn’t give off the glamour of his former running mate Barack Obama, Biden has long been able to claim some degree of default and/or anti-Trump A-list support: Julia Roberts attended the same fundraiser as Clooney earlier this year, while Robert De Niro, an outspoken critic of fellow New Yorker Trump, narrated a campaign ad, though this seems likely to stem from De Niro’s genuine – and, frankly, delightful! – seething hatred for Trump more than some personal allegiance to Biden. (In the meantime, who has been one of Trump’s biggest boosters on Insta? You guessed it: Frank Stallone.) Dwayne Johnson, who long identified as some manner of Republican, endorsed Biden late in the 2020 race. Earlier this year, though, Johnson announced that he wouldn’t be endorsing any candidates for 2024, Biden apparently not having done enough to help change the hierarchy of power in the DC Universe.It would be easy to see a shift like that as evidence of eroding support for Biden, and it probably is; having a major star specifically say, months and months before the election, that they don’t endorse either candidate (implying that this is unlikely to change), when it would be easy enough to simply say nothing or bide his time, feels unusual – just as it’s unusual for another major star to write an op-ed suggesting that a presidential candidate from his party must step down for the good of the country. But it’s also a sign of how micro-targeted a celebrity niche has become – maybe by force – in the social media era, where even silence has begun to seem like a tacit statement, rather than PR-managed decorum. Biden’s once-solid base of A-listers still skews on the older side, reflecting a time when endorsing a candidate felt at once simpler and less conspicuous. That’s true, too, of celebrities who have called for Biden to drop out: Michael Douglas and John Cusack are big names, but they’re sure not south of 50. Younger celebrities, mirroring younger demographics in general, may not be especially impressed with Biden’s handling of Israel and attendant failure to stop the bloodshed – which means they may not have been endorsing him to begin with.Of course, there’s a certain tempest-in-a-designer-teapot quality to tracking the whims of celebrity endorsements, which at least some of the general public probably views with skepticism – those clueless stars and their pet causes! George Clooney isn’t casting his vote in a swing state – or, for that matter, against Joe Biden, if it comes down to it. Biden could even argue that the shifting tastes of celebrities don’t interest him, as he’s maintained the image of a folksy, get-it-done underdog for much of his political career, even after ascending to the vice-presidency. Courting celebrity? Isn’t that a Trumpian hunger to begin with? Yet big celebrities can help with big-donor fundraising – and smaller ones arguably have bigger platforms than ever before. (John Cusack movies may not bring a million-plus people to the box office in a weekend, if they’re even released theatrically at all. But that’s his social-media audience.)From Hollywood’s love of Obama to Trump’s resurgence beginning on NBC to the sheer number of meme-based campaign posts, celebrity and politics have become more entwined than ever. Biden may not need celebrities to win, or for his sense of worth. But he does need actual support, and Clooney’s op-ed helped make him seem more like a cause than a candidate. More

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      ‘I never doubted it’: why film-maker Michael Moore forecast ‘blue tsunami’ in midterms

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      ‘I never doubted it’: why film-maker Michael Moore forecast ‘blue tsunami’ in midtermsFilm-maker says the salient lesson from the midterms for Democrats is to stop depressing their own vote with pessimism, fear and conventional thinking In the lead up to last week’s midterm elections in America, the punditocracy of commentators, pollsters and political-types were almost united: a “red wave” of Republican gains was on the cards.But one dissenting voice stood out: that of leftist filmmaker Michael Moore. Against all the commonplace predictions, he had forecast Democrats would do well. He called it a “blue tsunami”.That proved to be true in his home state of Michigan, where Democrats won governor, house and senate for the first time in 40 years, often by large margins. It’s been more of a blue wall across the rest of the country, where Republican gains mostly failed to materialize, with the exception of Florida. But even so, the strong Democrat performance has stunned people on both sides of the US political divide, delighting the left and sparking hand-wringing on the right.With the Democrats retaining power in the Senate, and a chance that even the House could remain in their control, suddenly Moore is looking like a prognosticator par excellence.“I never doubted it – there was no way the Republicans were going to have some kind of landslide,” Moore said in an interview.But, he added: “I don’t have any special powers, I’m not related to Nostradamus or Cassandra, but I was stunned once again that nobody was willing to stick their neck out. I was just trying to say that common sense, and data – and if you’re not living in a bubble – should bring you to the same conclusion that there are more of us than them.”“We’ve won seven of the last eight elections in the popular vote, we’ve got more registered, we have a new crop of young people every year, plus the fact that 70% of eligible voters are either women, people of color, or 18 to 25 year olds, or a combination of the three,” he said. “That’s the Democratic party’s base”.In the last of his increasingly popular mass emails, Mike’s Midterm Tsunami Truth #41, published on Wednesday, he wrote a devastating critique of the conventional wisdom of a US electorate focused on economic woes, fearful of crime and resigned to the loss of abortion rights, while non-plussed by the election-denying Republicans.“We were lied to for months by the pundits and pollsters and the media. Voters had not ‘moved on’ from the Supreme Court’s decision to debase and humiliate women by taking federal control over their reproductive organs. Crime was not at the forefront of the voters ‘simple’ minds. Neither was the price of milk. It was their democracy that they came to fight for yesterday,” he penned.Moore doesn’t have an answer for why pundits, pollsters and the media get it repeatedly wrong but theorizes that self-reinforcing storylines become established that are hard to back away off. He also questions the fear-mongering that’s often implicit in narrative lines the media adopt. “They may be trying to gin up the vote through fear – ‘This is going to happen so you’d better get your butts to polls’. They may think it’s noble, but I don’t think it’s noble at all,” he said.And there are questions for the political machinery. As anyone who has voted knows, the moment you register to vote or donate to candidate, the inbox is almost instantaneously bombarded with what Moore calls “scare emails”.“Don’t they understand that’s just going to depress the vote? If we don’t keep the House I think the reason for that is the scare tactics of the Democratic party and perhaps some enablers in the media who are ginning up this, ‘Trump is on his way back, folks, here comes the big bad boogie man’. By doing that they hurt the thing overall.”He wants a more positive message from the left, based less on scaring people and more on inspiring them. Already a self-defeating post-Trump narrative is taking shape, Moore believes, and it revolves mostly around Florida governor Ron DeSantis. “Oh, DeSantis is going to win because he’s like Trump but he’s smarter oooh, oooh”.DeSantis does represent the kind of forceful, base-pleasing call-to-arms that Democrats fear. “He is clever to rent private jets and fly refugees up to Martha’s Vineyard,” Moore says. “Do you know the sort of orgasmic feeling that happens inside a right-winger when they see him doing something wonderful and crazy like that, slamming it right in the liberals face.”The left can learn a lesson from that playbook: get creative, though not cruel. He points out that wasn’t until 10pm the night before the vote that Democrats finally put up a campaign ad featuring LeBron James, the most popular basketball player in America, asking voters in Georgia to vote against Herschel Walker in Georgia.“Why didn’t they do that months ago? They wait until the last night to put up one of great African American sports stars?”Last summer, when John Fetterman was laid up recovering from a stroke, his campaign went on Cameo.com and, for just $400, recruited reality-T.V. star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi of MTV’s Jersey Shore fame.“Hey Mehmet! This is Nicole ‘Snooki’ and I’m from ‘Jersey Shore’” Polizzi said in a video posted by Fetterman on Twitter, adding that she’d heard that he’d moved from New Jersey to Pennsylvania to “look for a new job.”“And personally, I don’t know why anyone would want to leave Jersey because it’s, like, the best place ever,” she said. “And we’re all hot messes. But I want to say best of luck to you. I know you’re away from home and you’re in a new place, but Jersey will not forget you. I just want to let you know I will not forget you.”The question for Democrats, Moore says, is why they wont use story-tellers, writers and creative people more often?In 2016, before Hillary Clinton lost the election, Moore, Amy Schumer, Chris Rock and Bill Maher offered to write lines for her debates with Trump, he says.“We offered to write great lines to throw at Trump whose his skin is so thin – and if she delivered them right – would just slide in and he’ll explode on the stage on live TV’, Moore recalls. “We were all-in on it, and nobody was going to know”.The gang presented the scheme to the Clinton campaign – and got flatly rejected.“They said, why would you do that? You know Amy, her comedy is apparently kind of dirty. Chris Rock, well he’s kind of controversial. They didn’t even get to me. They were so afraid of fucking up and being blamed… oh, so you were the one who let Amy Schumer and Michael Moore into the campaign. Thanks a lot!”“That proves my point that we won when they stuffed $400 on the Jersey Shore lady. We need more of that. Call me. Call a couple of Monty Python people. Call us!”Moore says two out of three emails he got after starting his email newsletter were from readers who signaled that they’d depressed themselves into thinking the mid-terms were a lost cause. Their reasoning followed, again, the narrative line of Biden’s low approval rating, inflation, the economy, crime and so on. They ignored the still burning rage of the loss of women’s reproductive rights.“I said, what’s inflation or past elections got to do with anything? We don’t live in that time anymore. There are now going to be more women doctors than men, more women lawyers than men. Don’t you have a clue that there is something going on? You can’t take human rights away from an entire gender and not have that blow up in your face”.The point was proved by the number of wins secured by abortion rights activists in ballot measures. There were wins in Kentucky, Michigan, California, Montana and Vermont, in addition to Kansas over the summer.Thus the salient lesson from the midterms is, to Moore, for Democrats to stop depressing their own vote with pessimism, fear and conventional thinking. “The average liberal, progressive leftist needs to immediately stop think you’re going to lose. Stop it, stop it, stop it. Think ‘the American people are with us’,” he said.TopicsUS midterm elections 2022US politicsDemocratsMichael MoorefeaturesReuse this content More

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      Michael Moore warns that Donald Trump is on course to repeat 2016 win

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      The documentary film-maker Michael Moore has warned that Donald Trump appears to have such momentum in some battleground states that liberals risk a repeat of 2016 when so many wrote off Trump only to see him grab the White House.“Sorry to have to provide the reality check again,” he said.Moore, who was one of few political observers to predict Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in 2016, said that “enthusiasm for Trump is off the charts” in key areas compared with the Democratic party nominee, Joe Biden.“Are you ready for a Trump victory? Are you mentally prepared to be outsmarted by Trump again? Do you find comfort in your certainty that there is no way Trump can win? Are you content with the trust you’ve placed in the DNC [Democratic National Committee] to pull this off?” Moore posted on Facebook late on Friday.Moore identified opinion polling in battleground states such as Minnesota and Michigan to make a case that the sitting president is running alongside or ahead of his rival.“The Biden campaign just announced he’ll be visiting a number of states – but not Michigan. Sound familiar?” Moore wrote, presumably indicating Hillary Clinton’s 2016 race when she made the error of avoiding some states that then swung to Trump.“I’m warning you almost 10 weeks in advance. The enthusiasm level for the 60 million in Trump’s base is OFF THE CHARTS! For Joe, not so much,” he later added.He continued to voters: “Don’t leave it to the Democrats to get rid of Trump. YOU have to get rid of Trump. WE have to wake up every day for the next 67 days and make sure each of us are going to get a hundred people out to vote. ACT NOW!”Moore cited CNN polling of registered voters this month to assert that “Biden and Trump were in a virtual tie”, including a poll that showed the pair tied at 47% in Minnesota. Moore said that Trump “has closed the gap to 4 points” in Michigan.A national CNN poll this month showed that Biden’s lead over Trump has narrowed nationally, 50% to 46%, while a survey from the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group found Biden and Trump statistically tied at 47% in Minnesota, and Trump narrowly leading Biden in Michigan. The margin of error for the poll, which surveyed 1,048 people, is 2.98%.Moore, a vocal supporter of Bernie Sanders’s leftwing candidacy, warned in October 2016 that “Trump’s election is going to be the biggest ‘f*** you’ ever recorded in human history – and it will feel good,” even as Clinton appeared to be sailing to victory.“Whether Trump means it or not is kind of irrelevant because he’s saying the things to people who are hurting, and that’s why every beaten-down, nameless, forgotten working stiff who used to be part of what was called the middle class loves Trump,” Moore warned at that time.Moore’s latest warnings come as Trump said at a campaign event in New Hampshire on Friday night that he supported seeing the first female president of the United States, but recommended his daughter over the Democratic vice-presidential candidate Kamala Harris.“They’re all saying ‘we want Ivanka,’” Trump told his supporters. “I don’t blame them.” More