Michael Moore angered his fellow leftists in 2016 — and greatly improved his credibility as a political analyst — when he accurately predicted that we’d all soon be referring to Donald Trump as “PRESIDENT TRUMP.”
“I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I gave it to you straight last summer when I told you that Donald Trump would be the Republican nominee for president,” Moore famously wrote in a post on his website titled “5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win.” “And now I have even more awful, depressing news for you: Donald J. Trump is going to win in November. This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath is going to be our next president. President Trump. Go ahead and say the words, ‘cause you’ll be saying them for the next four years: ‘PRESIDENT TRUMP.'”
And now Moore is engaging in more electoral prognostications that Democrats probably won’t want to hear at this point in the process: The only candidate who Moore believes can truly “crush” Trump is not running.
In an interview with MSNBC reported by The Hill, the progressive documentarian declared that only a person whose last name “rhymes with Obama” can beat Trump. The only silver bullet to finally put to death the reign of the Democrats’ archnemesis is “Michelle Obama.”
“Everybody watching this right now knows she is a beloved American and she would go in there and she would beat him,” Moore told MSNBC.
Beating Trump in total votes is not enough, he said, pointing to twice-failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton garnering 3 million more votes than Trump only to be drowned in red on the electoral map. What Democrats need is a “street fighter,” Moore said, because they can’t remove Trump without first “crushing” him.
“The only way to remove Trump is to crush Trump,” said Moore. “And that’s the question that has to be asked, who can crush Trump? Who’s the street fighter?”
While four of the current candidates have a chance at beating him in total votes, Moore fears that will not be enough. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Kamala Harris (D-CA) could potentially beat Trump, but they can’t “crush” him in the way Moore believes necessary to truly take him down.
“She would beat him in the debates, he wouldn’t be able to bully her, he wouldn’t be able to nickname her,” said Moore, describing her as “powerful” and “so good” on stage. Moore pleaded with someone to ask her step up and serve.
In his famous 2016 Trump analysis, Moore listed five reasons he believed Trump would win, including his appeal to the Rust Belt voters, backlash among “angry white men,” Hillary’s widespread unpopularity, including among Democrats, the “depressed Sanders vote,” and “the electorate’s ability to be mischievous” and vote for a nonpolitical figure who shakes things up. The most specific and prescient of his predictions was his assessment of the Rust Belt situation heading into November, which read in part:
Trump is ahead of Hillary in the latest polls in Pennsylvania and tied with her in Ohio. Tied? How can the race be this close after everything Trump has said and done? Well maybe it’s because he’s said (correctly) that the Clintons’ support of NAFTA helped to destroy the industrial states of the Upper Midwest. Trump is going to hammer Clinton on this and her support of TPP and other trade policies that have royally screwed the people of these four states. When Trump stood in the shadow of a Ford Motor factory during the Michigan primary, he threatened the corporation that if they did indeed go ahead with their planned closure of that factory and move it to Mexico, he would slap a 35% tariff on any Mexican-built cars shipped back to the United States. It was sweet, sweet music to the ears of the working class of Michigan, and when he tossed in his threat to Apple that he would force them to stop making their iPhones in China and build them here in America, well, hearts swooned and Trump walked away with a big victory that should have gone to the governor next-door, John Kasich. […] In 2012, Mitt Romney lost by 64 electoral votes. Add up the electoral votes cast by Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It’s 64. All Trump needs to do to win is to carry, as he’s expected to do, the swath of traditional red states from Idaho to Georgia (states that’ll never vote for Hillary Clinton), and then he just needs these four rust belt states. He doesn’t need Florida. He doesn’t need Colorado or Virginia. Just Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And that will put him over the top. This is how it will happen in November.