Michael Moore, pointedly ironic as ever, opens Fahrenheit 11/9 with Hillary Clinton’s victory rally. Her joyous supporters believed they were witnessing history and they were—just not the outcome they counted on. That glass ceiling above the stage where she planned to give her acceptance speech remained intact. Down the street in Manhattan, the smaller Trump crowd went ecstatic as Fox News ticked off the wins: Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. Trump and company shuffle onstage looking strangely saddened. The next President of the United States hadn’t even prepared a victory speech.
Fahrenheit 11/9 is Moore’s idiosyncratic investigation into what happened. He has an odd and amusing hypothesis: Trump launched his campaign upon learning that NBC paid Gwen Stefani more money for “The Voice” than he received for “The Apprentice.” His presidential run began as an attention-grabbing bid for a raise from the network. But soon enough, Trump, always craving the center of attention, inhaled the adulation from the crowds as he riled them up with xenophobic tales of murderous Mexicans, cunning Chinamen and insidious followers of Islam. He found the loudest if not the largest audience of his showbiz career.
Even after Trump slayed his GOP rivals with sharp arrows of snark, almost everyone predicted he would lose in November—even Fox News. It was especially unsettling given that Trump lost the popular vote but won through the creaky mechanism of the Electoral College.
“He played the media for suckers,” Moore says and doesn’t let himself off the hook. Fahrenheit 11/9 includes footage of Steve Bannon (who distributed Moore’s film Sicko for home video) praising the Michigan rabble rouser and Jared Kushner extolling the maverick filmmaker at the Sicko release party he paid for. And then there’s old footage of Moore yukking it up with Trump on Roseanne Barr’s show. The mogul said he enjoyed Roger and Me but joked about Moore, “I hope he doesn’t do one on me.” During the 2016 campaign, Trump boasted that he had dinner with Moore but Moore claims they never broke bread. Another lie from a man immune to truth or is Moore editing reality?
As always, Moore rambles widely within his subject. A slide show of Trump and pubescent daughter Ivanka in seemingly provocative poses (plus his backstage visits at Miss Teen USA) leads to the conclusion that Trump seldom saw much necessity in hiding anything (except when it came to Russia and taxes). This trails into Trump’s association with Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, CEO of the world’s worst computer brand, Gateway, and determined to run his state like a business. Moore indicts Snyder for essentially poisoning the water of Flint for profit and trying to cover his crimes and finds worries about Snyder’s administrative coup, which supplanted democratically elected municipal officials with “emergency managers” beholden only to him. Most folks living under emergency rule were black.
The Clintons, by the way, don’t leave Fahrenheit 11/9 with a clean record either. Moore charges Hillary with stealing the Democratic nomination from Bernie Sanders through overriding voters in many states with her super delegate cronies. And jolly old Bill’s policies of massive incarceration, deregulation of banks and a morbid devotion to free trade helped create the mess America is in.
After a while, Fahrenheit 11/9 turns into a campaign video for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and other rising candidates on the left of the Democratic Party. Then there are the trademark Moore stunts, including hosing the lawn of the Michigan governor’s mansion with water from Flint that elicit laughter but little else. Both fun and disturbing, Fahrenheit 11/9 spares neither party and delivers some surprising statistics: Americans by a large majority support regulating banks and guns and a whole raft of Bernie planks. Maybe the country will turn blue after this November?
