Michael Moore Lashes Out Following Election

Liberal filmmaker and activist Michael Moore broke his silence on the 2024 election on Wednesday, expressing deep frustration and anger at American voters for returning Donald Trump to the presidency by a wide margin. In a candid post on his website, MichaelMoore.com, the director of Fahrenheit 9/11 and Bowling for Columbine laced his comments with an embittered critique of the American electorate, categorizing the decision as a reflection of the nation’s troubled past and moral failings.

Moore, who had been outspoken in his confidence of a Democratic victory prior to the election, now appeared disillusioned by the outcome. “If you stop and think about it, we’ve come up with a lot of doozies in our history,” Moore wrote, referencing the genocide of Native Americans, the enslavement of Africans, and the Vietnam War. “We are not a good people,” Moore declared, linking these historical wrongs to the election of a man he called “a 34-time convicted felon, a fascist, and a civilly-charged and convicted sexual abuser.”

Before the election, Moore had been resolutely optimistic, predicting a landslide victory for Vice President Kamala Harris and a crushing defeat for Trump. On November 3, just two days before Election Day, Moore appeared on MSNBC, where he spoke with confidence about the outcome, expressing faith that the majority of Americans were tired of divisiveness and violence.

“The majority of Americans do not want this divisiveness, they don’t want a threat of violence. We are okay to disagree with each other, but that’s where it ends,” Moore said. He continued by painting a picture of a largely untroubled American electorate: “We go to vote, who wins, wins. Half the time, I have been very happy with who has won, and the other half of the time, I haven’t been. And we move on with our lives.”

At the time, Moore was convinced that Trump was “toast” and that his supporters would be surprised by the election results. “I feel the same way that I felt a few weeks ago, that Trump is toast, absolutely. I feel it more now,” he declared confidently. Moore’s upbeat prediction seemed almost prescient as he mocked Democrats’ fear of Trump’s resurgence, calling them “a frightened group of people” in an October CNN interview.

Following the election, Moore’s tone shifted dramatically. The filmmaker was highly critical of both the Democratic Party’s strategy and the Harris campaign’s failure to connect with working-class voters. “It’s possible that history may be kinder to us if, next time, the working class doesn’t see our candidate campaigning with Wall Street billionaires,” Moore wrote. He also expressed disdain for the Democratic Party’s embrace of establishment figures, lamenting how the campaign celebrated endorsements from figures he described as “war criminals.”

After insisting that Americans were “not a good people” because his preferred candidate lost the election, Moore ironically closed his post with a call for unity and personal reflection. In an appeal for kindness, he wrote, “The first step in counteracting Trump’s crusade of cruelty, hatred, bigotry, misogyny, ignorance, and fear is for each of us, in our daily lives, to be kind.”

Moore also encouraged his followers to practice forgiveness, advising them to “forgive someone” because it was “the right thing to do.” While the filmmaker did not directly name anyone, his comments appeared to be a response to the toxic political climate in the wake of the election, where division and rancor had reached new heights. His comments seemed to imply that he was asking liberals to forgive Trump supporters in their lives, which lacked self awareness in and of itself, by assuming that these voters had done something that needed to be forgiven.