Stephen King writes scary novels, full of mayhem, mystery and murder. One never knows what monstrous ghoulish turn of events will leap from the next page. Unless you want a sleepless night, do not read anything King wrote after 6 p.m. But I have come across a recent piece in Tikkun Magazine, the progressive voice of American Judaism, which I find far more frightening than anything King has ever penned.
The article was written by Michael Moore, the courageous filmmaker on the far left edge of the Hollywood world. His political wisdom is penetrating and his sword has punctured and deflated every form of conservative piety. Six months ago Moore announced that, in his opinion, Donald Trump would win the Republican nomination for president. We all knew better. Most Republicans who were and are the backbone of that party were not going to let it happen, and the rest of us had a high regard for the conservatives of the nation who knew Trump would be creamed. So Michael Moore was just making another one of his over-the-top jokes. But guess what! Moore, in this current article, made another prediction. Donald Trump is going to win the presidency and the rest of us better get prepared for it! That’s scarier than anything King has ever written! Moore details five reasons for making this outlandish prediction. Here they are.
1. Trump will center his campaign on flipping the four true blue states of the rust belt—Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin—seeking to convince the unemployed or underemployed former factory workers and their families that Hillary promises only more of the same for them. Angry embittered workers have watched this former manufacturing heartland, now strewn with dead smokestacks and littered with the carcasses of the nation’s most productive factories. Flipping those states from blue to red will make a dramatic difference in the electoral map.
2. This election marks the last stand of America’s angry males and their bitterness will blot out all rationality. If white males formerly ran things, they have watched that dominance slowly slip out of their hands. The nomination of a woman by the Democrats is the last straw.
3. Hillary’s unpopularity, which has festered for over twenty-five years, continues unabated. Why she is despised, even by a sturdy collection of Democrats, is the subject of other columns. The fact remains that a majority of America’s people do not trust her.
4. While a significant percentage of the Sanders’ constituency will finally agree that if it is not Bernie, then it has to be Hillary, there are many others who have felt the Bern, will have fought hard, and believe they lost in an rigged election. They may stay home, opt for Trump, or even more likely vote for Jill Stein, the Green candidate or Gary Johnson, the Libertarian standard-bearer. Just yesterday I talked to three dedicated progressives who said they would not vote for Hillary under any circumstances.
5. The fifth reason that Michael Moore is predicting the election of Donald Trump in November, is what he calls “the Jesse Ventura Effect.” You recall that Ventura was a professional wrestler who, against all odds and all predictions, was elected governor of Minnesota. He was elected not because he had a grasp on the issues that faced that state; he was elected just because he could be. Everything had been thrown up in the air. People wanted change, but there was no agreement as to what that meant. Ventura was a practical joke, but the state was so unsettled that few saw the disaster coming.
Well, there’s Michael Moore’s current read on things. Is he right? Only if the American people forget who they are and dismiss the grandeur of this nation. And that means that we need to get over dismissing Hillary over single issue, or because we have heard for 25 years, without really looking at her record, that she should not be trusted. It could be that Michael Moore frightens us into action. Let’s hope so.
