Although the ads for Michael Moore’s upcoming one-man show, The Terms of My Surrender, ask “Can a Broadway show bring down a sitting president?” Moore himself isn’t counting on it. He’s also working on a new documentary entitled Fahrenheit 11/9, which, according to a press release, “is expected to be key in dissolving Trump’s ‘teflon’ shield, and, in turn, his presidency.”
“No matter what you throw at him, it hasn’t worked,” Moore said in a statement. “No matter what is revealed, he remains standing. Facts, reality, brains, cannot defeat him. Even when he commits a self-inflicted wound, he gets up the next morning and keeps going and tweeting. That ends now.”
Fahrenheit 11/9 is named for the day Trump’s electoral victory was determined, an outcome Moore is not inclined to let us forget he predicted. The title is also an obvious play on Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, which examined the Bush administration’s response to the 9/11 attacks and shattered the previous box-office records for a nonfiction film. What it didn’t do, of course, is get George W. Bush out of office, and while Moore can claim a sort of victory in predicting the election’s outcome, the declining grosses of his subsequent movies don’t suggest he’s in a position to lead any kind of mass movement.
Like Bob and Harvey Weinstein, who will distribute 11/9 just as they distributed 9/11 (apologies to Slate’s European readers), Moore’s greatest gift is for showmanship, but he’s as toxic to Trump voters as CNN or the Washington Post, and there’s little reason to suspect he’ll be able to make himself heard where they have not. If Moore succeeds in getting out of his own way, as he did when Fahrenheit 9/11 ceded the screen to Gold Star mother Cindy Sheehan, its predecessor may well stir the passions of those who end up seeing it. But within the Trump bubble it will be just one more piece of evidence that the liberal media are conspiring against the president, one more reason to stay glued to Fox News and Breitbart and tune out everything else. Maybe Moore will finish up by predicting Trump’s second term as well.
