The Hollywood Reporter: Michael Moore presented the Italian premiere of his new film, Fahrenheit 11/9, about the current state of American politics, at the Rome Film Festival on Saturday. Earlier in the week, he met briefly with Pope Francis, at the Vatican’s weekly public address.
The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker engaged in a “Close Encounter” conversation with the festival audience, where he compared Donald Trump’s America to the current government in Italy, which now has far-right, anti-immigration Lega Nord’s Matteo Salvini and the populist Five Star Movement’s Luigi Di Maio serving as deputy prime ministers.
Moore was surprised to be asked if having Trump as president makes him miss George W. Bush.
“We will always, always, always hold George W. Bush responsible for war crimes for invading Iraq, a country that did nothing to us,” said Moore. “He’s a criminal and I think there’s a reason why he and Cheney stay away from Europe because they’re afraid of being arrested.”
Referring to them as “these two disasters,” Moore spoke of the similarities of Bush and Trump coming to power. “Bush and Trump both lost the election. Both got the least number of votes. Al Gore won by a half a million votes. Hillary Clinton won by 3 million votes,” he said. “If we were a democracy, they should have been the presidents.”
“The left, the Democrats, the liberals after Gore was denied the White House, should have fought to remove that clause of the Constitution that allows the loser to sit in the White House,” he said. “We should have done that 16 years ago.”
Moore also said the popular narrative of Trump winning the working class vote in 2016 is wrong. “A better way to put it is he won the white vote,” he said.
“What you need to understand about the U.S. now, is that it is changing very quickly. Right now a little over two-thirds of the country who are eligible to vote, are either women, people of color, or young adults between 18-35. That’s the majority of America right now,” he said.
“And they will determine the direction of the country,” he continued, without referencing the fact that only a little more than half of eligible voters came out to polls in 2016. “These are the last days of the dying dinosaur, the old white man who has been making the decisions since the beginning of our time.”
