After spending his first segment on Late Night with Seth Meyers expressing how hopeful the massive protests against police brutality were making him, Michael Moore took a very dark turn Wednesday night.
Noting that Moore was one of the few public figures predicting that Trump would beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, Seth Meyers asked the documentary filmmaker how “worried” he is about the country’s ability to hold a fair election in the fall.
“I’m very worried about this. We all need to be very worried about this,” Moore said. He pointed to the giant fence that the president has erected around the White House this past week as an ominous sign of what’s to come.
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“We make jokes about this, but I think this is a dry run for the fall,” Moore added. Stressing that he has “no inside information” from Eric or Donald Trump Jr., he said, “I do believe that he’s now read the polls. He sees the data that he’s probably going to lose. He knows it. And so now he’s got to come up with something. And that something will be him trying to postpone the election.”
Moore predicted that the dreaded “second wave” of the coronavirus pandemic will be Trump’s excuse to try to cancel the presidential election. “It will make sort of, kind of sense to just enough people that, ‘yeah, we really probably shouldn’t have the election, let’s postpone it,’” he said. “But in Trump’s mind, and the way people like Trump think is, once you postpone something, it’s gone.”
“We can’t let that happen, no matter how bad it is,” Moore said.
Besides correctly predicting that Trump would win in 2016, Moore also warned Americans nearly two years ago that Trump would create a “so-called national emergency” to help himself keep the presidency for a second term. “This is our democracy and I’m afraid that this president will use that moment as he does other moments to go into strongman mode,” he said at the time.
Trump may not have created COVID-19, but he did declare a national emergency—adding, “two very big words”—nearly three months ago in the Rose Garden. “Strongman mode” came only after the country rose up in opposition to police brutality.
