DVD REVIEW: Michael Moore on How We Got Trump

Sorting through some old computer disks I found my never-published review of Michael Moore's movie Fahrenheit 11/9 so I'm posting it here and also on other social media. 

How in 11/9/16 did we get here—to President Donald Trump—and what do we do now, asks Michael Moore’s expose of Trump’s America, Fahrenheit 11/9, now on DVD and Blu-ray, at retailers including Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Target. 

In a press release Moore argued no one wanted to watch Trump for two hours, so Fahrenheit 11/9 is, “about far more than just Trump. It's about how we got here—and how the Resistance movement is bringing America back from the brink.”

With this logline, Moore’s feature-length documentary tackles enough subjects for three movies, but the result is, none of these complicated issues are covered thoroughly. There’s his sad angry hindsight concerning Hillary Clinton’s ill-fated 2016 presidential campaign. There’s coverage of some of what Moore calls “the Resistance movement,” the reawakening of the American left, many of them inspired by socialist-leaning senator Bernie Sanders and the survivors of the 2018 Marjorie Stoneman Douglas school shooting. There’s the poisoning of the water in Moore’s hometown, Flint, Michigan, worse than any terrorist attack America has yet experienced--and which President Barack Obama, a Democrat, treated as a publicity opp.

How the poisoning of Flint’s water connects with Trump is a broken line, and for all of Moore’s hard hitting, his hits don’t make many direct connections. The filmmaker draws upon personal experience, showing how under Republican governor Rick Snyder, Michigan underwent governance similar to Trump’s America—including years of fake “emergency declarations” like what we have since seen happen with Trump and border security. Flint’s water supply was switched and the wealthy profited while the working people got toxic water.

Ironically in this expose of Trump, Obama looks bad, too. Moore finds what may be the scandal in Obama’s otherwise scandal-free administration, and it’s what Obama did in response to the poisoning of an American city. He visited Flint to much fanfare, mouthed a story about licking lead when he was a small child, and pretended to drink Flint water from a glass. We see nothing comparable to what a Democrat like Kennedy or Johnson might have done. How many votes this shameless publicity stunt may have cost the Democrats in a key state is incalculable, and Moore doesn’t even address the possibility of a connection.   

Moore ranges across still more subjects only indirectly connected to Trump. We spend some time with the teachers’ strikes that happened in several states in 2017, interview the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, Ben Ferencz, and hear Moore ponder whether we’re one 9/11 or zero 9/11’s away from going the way of Germany under Adolf Hitler.

Although Moore may say no one wants to watch Trump for two hours, the fact remains that 63 million people voted for him. That Moore backed away from focusing relentlessly on Trump’s alleged crimes and corruption—from the 1980s to the present, before and after becoming president—is another way of letting him get away with all he keeps getting away with. When America starts looking at Trump himself instead of Hillary, Flint’s water, schoolteachers, Nazism, “the resistance” of ragtag schoolchildren who saw their classmates fall in blood, only then will we see how to get away from this man and all his toxicity, as dangerous in its way as Flint’s toxic water.