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MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, I think, actually, anybody watching this can do this. I really believe in the power of a few people can make huge change happen. And I talk about this in my show, that history is full of examples of people who really changed the world, not accepting the lie that they were told all their lives, that they were just a nobody from nowhere. And so, I believe—I believe in that.
And I believe—so, yes, so I’m on—you know, I’ve come from Michigan to New York to do the show. I come from the Brexit states out there. And I wanted to—I wanted to do this in the city that gave us Donald J. Trump. I mean, basically, I’ve come to the belly of the beast here. And we do the show 12 blocks from Trump Tower every day.
AMY GOODMAN: Didn’t you take a bus there?
MICHAEL MOORE: We took a bus—yes, one night, we thought we’d go over and have some cheesecake or a tortilla bowl or whatever it is that he—the KFC, whatever he loves, we were going to like have some dinner with him, but he said he wasn’t hungry.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what are the terms of your surrender?
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, now, if I told you that, what’s the point of coming to the—it takes me two hours to explain that. I can’t. But, well, basically, none of us are going to surrender. I mean, the actual terms are pretty extensive. And it’s not just getting rid of Trump. I mean, we have—we have to take a look at how we got Trump. He didn’t just fall out of the sky. He’s the end result of decades of both dumbing down the country but also the widening gap between those with wealth and those who work to provide the wealth for those who are rich.
AMY GOODMAN: We just were—
MICHAEL MOORE: It’s also—yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —interviewing Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner from Bangladesh, talking about—he thinks it’s now five men own more wealth than half the world’s population.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, yeah. Isn’t that amazing?
AMY GOODMAN: Right? Three-point-six billion people.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah. So, he’s the kind of natural result of this. It’s not some crazy accident, the way I look at it. And, in fact, he’s the result of a racist clause in the United States Constitution. So, this is—that Electoral College concept of trying to convince the slave states, as you know—you’ve talked about it on the show—to come into the country, the new country, we put this clause in there that let them count slaves while giving them no power, really. And so, he benefited from that. But the show isn’t—I mean, it’s not a history lesson. It’s not a college lecture. Well, I mean, you’ve seen it. So, it—
AMY GOODMAN: The show is spectacular. And you are constantly responding to whatever the latest is, which is happening every day. So, on Sunday, you raised the fist in honor of Colin Kaepernick?
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, right. Well, I’ve been wearing Colin’s jersey and the 49ers hat here for well over a year ago, since he first did that a year ago, last summer. And I participate in the NFL boycott. I don’t watch any NFL games. I encourage people to boycott the sponsors of the NFL. The owners colluded to keep him from his job this year because he took a stand. What’s real—so this past—so, a few Sundays ago, I got the whole audience, we all stood with these signs, hashtag #ImWithKap. And I put that out on the internet. But this Sunday, I wore the jersey, his jersey, the whole show. And the whole audience, or most of them, raised the fist there with me on the stage.
But what was interesting about this past Sunday—I just want to say this—is that it became more against Trump than about the original idea of what Colin was saying, which is that we have to take a stand against this brutality of police killing unarmed black citizens. And that’s how this originally started. And the owners punished him for that. And it was supposed to send a message to the rest of the players: "Don’t you take a stand. Don’t you speak out politically." After Trump said what he said, then all—it was clear all the players were all going to participate.
AMY GOODMAN: I want to go—
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: —to that moment Friday night, Huntsville, Alabama. This is what Donald Trump said at his rally.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, "Get that son of a bitch off the field right now. Out. He’s fired. He’s fired!"? Wouldn’t you love it?
AUDIENCE: U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: You know, some owner is going to do that. He’s going to say, "That guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired." And that owner—they don’t know it. They don’t know. They’re friends of mine, many of them. They don’t know. They’ll be the most popular person for a week. They’ll be the most popular person in this country, because that’s a total disrespect of our heritage. That’s a total disrespect of everything that we stand for, OK?
AMY GOODMAN: As he talked about firing these "sons of bitches," Colin Kaepernick’s mother said, "Guess that makes me..."
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah. Well, I’m not going to say it, but, yes.
AMY GOODMAN: One proud one.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah. No, that Trump—see, this is what—this is what bothered me, though, about Sunday, is that we think that he’s easily distracted by, you know, the shiny keys, whatever it is. You know, there’s this awful thing going on with the tragedy in Puerto Rico, and he’s completely consumed with the NFL. And so we think that’s—you know, that’s how simple he is and where his mind goes. But I think and I’m worried that we’re the ones distracted by the shiny keys, because as soon as he made such a big deal about it, then the protest shifted from what it’s really supposed to be about—stop shooting black people in this country, police of America—and now it was all about Trump, and now the owners joined in. They all joined. And once—you know, I think a lot of the players, especially the white players—"Well, now I’m not going to lose my job, if the owners are going to lock arms with us."
But then, the whole point—and I thought, "Jesus, he’s really—Trump is really good with this, with this sort of—the way we just jump to the next thing." You know, something really important is going on every single day in his administration, where they are poisoning this country, where they’re selling off lands to oil companies. Whatever it is, it’s going on as we speak right now. And we, all of a sudden, and especially the mainstream media, gets focused on what he said about, you know, Joe and Mika in the morning. It’s just like the whole rest of the news cycle is all about Mika, and it’s not about what it should really be about.
AMY GOODMAN: But when he does the attack and goes after someone—of course, with these players, we’re talking about largely African-American teams.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, right.
AMY GOODMAN: And he’s attacking African-American players.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: You respond, as so many people do. And how critical it is. He may create the situation—
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: —but then it has to be responded to.
MICHAEL MOORE: And then we have to point out, and I think—and a lot of the players have pointed out—remember, this isn’t about—really about Trump. We’re doing this against the racial injustice, the racism that still exists in our society and how safe it is to be a black man in our society when it comes to the police pulling you over or whatever. And I think nobody wants that to get lost in all this discussion.
AMY GOODMAN: So, I want to go then to Puerto Rico, the critical point, right?
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: He tweets however many times, 15 times over the weekend—
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, right.
AMY GOODMAN: —about the NFL and fire them and cursing. Not once did he tweet about Puerto Rico. And I want to talk about the catastrophe, climate catastrophe, there. Took him five full days to respond to the plight of Puerto Rico over the weekend. Right, 17 times about athletes, and again, protesting police violence. Facing withering criticism, on Tuesday he holds a news conference congratulating himself for his response to the disaster. I think he repeated nearly a dozen times that he was doing a great, amazing, tremendous, incredible job, and denied he had neglected Puerto Rico. This is what he said.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I wasn’t preoccupied with the NFL. I was ashamed of what was taking place, because, to me, that was a very important moment. I don’t think you can disrespect our country, our flag, our national anthem. To me, the NFL situation is a very important situation. I’ve heard that before, about was I preoccupied. Not at all. Not at all. I have plenty of time on my hands. All I do is work. And to be honest with you, that’s an important function of working. It’s called respect for our country. ...
The governor of Puerto Rico is so thankful for the great job that we’re doing. We did a great job in Texas, a great job in Florida, a great job in Louisiana. We hit little pieces of Georgia and Alabama. And frankly, we’re doing—and it’s the most difficult job, because it’s on the island. It’s on an island in the middle of the ocean. It’s out in the ocean. You can’t just drive your trucks there from other states. And the governor said we are doing a great job. In fact, he thanked me specifically for FEMA and all of the first responders in Puerto Rico. And we’re also mentioning with that the U.S. Virgin Islands. It was devastated. So we are totally focused on that.
AMY GOODMAN: So, that’s President Trump. Instead of "Heck of a job, Brownie," it’s "Heck of a job, myself."
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. And, Amy, "It’s an island. You know it’s an island, don’t you?" And he went on to say, too, "There’s a big ocean. There’s a big ocean there between us." It’s like—I’m convinced he has no idea where Puerto Rico is. All he knows is that the people there are not white. And that’s why it’s not a priority. And let’s just be honest and say, you know, how his mind thinks.
And, you know, the way that he and others, too, focus on—you know, when they talk about these NFL players, who, as you say, are 70 percent African Americans, and how much they make and how—they keep saying this: "Look how much—they’re not grateful to this country. Look how much they make. Look how much they make." You will never hear anybody complain about what Tom Hanks makes. You know? You will never—it’s just—it’s always a little tell that it’s just "Wait a minute. Wait a minute. We let you in the club, boy. Behave yourself." You know, that’s really the message. And that message was right there about Puerto Rico, "By the way, did I mention the Virgin Islands?"
It’s like, you know, it’s still—like, see, I even—we laugh, but now—see, we used to laugh at him, especially New Yorkers. You know this, because you guys were supposed to take care of him for about 40 years and make sure he wasn’t foisted on the rest of us. I’m not putting you personally responsible for this, Amy, but I’m just saying, if Donald Trump came from Flint, Michigan, I couldn’t show my face on this show, because how could I explain that I, for 30 or 40 years, you know, didn’t do something about him there, before he would be thrust upon this country? But he is—he’s not a joke. And the time to sort of—laughing about this has to be, hopefully, long, long gone by now, because we are in very serious trouble here. And anybody who doesn’t think he could be a two-term Trump is living in their little fantasy bubble. The Republicans are not going to impeach him. They’ve already polled their gerrymandered districts back home. They’re pretty sure they’re safe. They don’t think we can flip those 24 seats in the House next year and three in the Senate. And all he has to do is keep his base, which he seems to have pretty well intact, and win those same electoral states. So, we have a real fight on our hands here.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, you were the one who did predict all along—you took him very seriously, comedian that you are, from the beginning. You said this man has a real chance, even as the Hillary Clinton folks were saying, "We want to run against him."
MICHAEL MOORE: I know. And, you know, those of us, like in Michigan and Wisconsin, we kept trying to get a hold of people at the headquarters in Brooklyn, you know, another New York city. I mean, seriously, you couldn’t get through the bubble in Brooklyn to say, "Would you please come out to Wisconsin and Michigan?" I mean, I voted for Bernie. I was for Bernie. But she lost Wisconsin and Michigan to Bernie. If you lost your own primary—in other words, your people didn’t want you to be president—wouldn’t you kind of maybe show up there sometime before the last week of the general election? It just—it was mind-boggling how—the poor judgment that took place around her.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Michael Moore. And I want to turn right now to, you know, the white supremacist rallies that have taken place, after what happened in Charlottesville, and President Trump.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I think there’s blame on both sides. And I have no doubt about it, and you don’t have any doubt about it, either. And—and—
REPORTER 1: But only the Nazis—
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: And—and if you reported it accurately, you would say.
REPORTER 2: One side killed a person. Heather Heyer died—
REPORTER 1: The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville. They showed up in Charlottesville—
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Excuse me. Excuse me.
REPORTER 1: —to protest the removal of that statue.
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They didn’t put themselves down as neo—and you had some very bad people in that group. But you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides. You had people in that group—excuse me. Excuse me. I saw the same pictures as you did. You had people in that group that were there to protest the taking down of, to them, a very, very important statue and the renaming of a park, from Robert E. Lee to another name. ...
I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group, other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, OK? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly. Now, in the other group also, you had some fine people, but you also had troublemakers. And you see them come with a—with the black outfits and with the helmets and with the baseball bats. You’ve got a—you had a lot of bad—you had a lot of bad people in the other group, too.
AMY GOODMAN: That’s President Trump talking about the "very fine people" in Charlottesville, the white supremacists. We’re talking about the Ku Klux Klansmen in Boston. Forty thousand people turned out to protest a small group of people, because they were so horrified. You tell the story in The Terms of My Surrender about your experience as a young man going to Bitburg because President Reagan did. Could you share that story here?
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. Well, I was—it came on the TV. I was in a bar with some friends in downtown Flint, Michigan, and Reagan announced that he was going to Bitburg to lay a wreath on the graves of SS Nazi soldiers to honor them, in Bitburg, Germany. And nobody—people were confused. Why are you—why would you want to honor Nazis? And let me just say—this is a side point here—thank God we’ve never had another president since Reagan that was so enamored with Nazis.
But so, a friend of mine, Gary, both of his parents were survivors of Auschwitz. And we decided to go to Bitburg to confront Reagan in the cemetery. And we made up some fake press credentials. Gary spoke fluent German. I spoke fluent bull—well, BS. And we were able to get into the cemetery. We snuck into the cemetery and waited for Reagan to get there. And then we whipped out this banner that said "We came from Michigan to remind you they killed my family." And the German cops jumped us immediately, ripped the banner out of our hands. This is—
AMY GOODMAN: But wait, there was some media there.
MICHAEL MOORE: Oh, yeah, there was a lot.
AMY GOODMAN: Which you had managed to get right next to.
MICHAEL MOORE: Well, yeah. Well, I saw Pierre Salinger standing over there. And he was working for ABC at the time, and he was President Kennedy’s press secretary. So I just went up to him, and I said, "Mr. Salinger, my friend and I, we’re from Flint, Michigan. We’re not press." You know, like he couldn’t tell.
AMY GOODMAN: Though you had press badges.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, we had the badges. "We’re going to do an action here, when Reagan gets here, but we’re afraid the Germans are going to hurt us. And if you could have your camera there? Because I think the last thing the Germans want today is footage going out across the world of them beating a Jew in the Bitburg cemetery." And Salinger was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ll help you. Sure, sure, sure." And so, he had his camera right there. And I think that—because the cop that had grabbed me already had his club up over my head like he was going to come down with it. And he saw the—he turned, and he saw the lens of Pierre Salinger’s camera right there. And he goes, "Aaaarrgh, aaaarrgh," and he puts the billy club away, and I didn’t get my head cracked open. So, then they just hauled us out of there. They put us in the back of a truck and just hauled us out of there.
AMY GOODMAN: So this was shown all over the world. This—
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes, yes. We were live on ABC. And yeah, because it was—yes. If you remember, at the time, if you’re old enough, if you saw that, it was quite—people just couldn’t understand why Reagan was wanting to lay a wreath on Nazi graves. But like I said, fortunately, we’re through that kind of president, and that won’t happen again.
AMY GOODMAN: You’ve been taking on these issues, from white supremacy, Ku Klux Klansmen, racist violence, for quite some time, right back to high school, another story you tell. But your story of the Elks Club?
MICHAEL MOORE: Yes. Well, I had gone to—I was selected to go to Boys State, which is where you go to play government for a week. Every high school, at least in Michigan, sent five girls and five boys to Girls State and Boys State. And you elect a girl governor and boy governor and a state legislature and all that. It’s to teach you how to run a campaign. And I didn’t want anything to do with it, and so I just stayed in my dorm room the whole time—except I saw a poster one day that said "Speech contest. Write a speech on the life of Abraham Lincoln and win a prize here at Boys State, sponsored by the Elks Club."
And my dad had just gone to join—it’s 1971. He had just gone to join the Elks Club. And he got there, and they gave him an application form, and at the top of the application form it said "Caucasians only." This is the '70s. It's still legal. The 1964 Civil Rights Act, there was a loophole that allowed—racial discrimination could continue if it was a private group or a membership organization. So, back then, for instance, you have "the Friends of Democracy Now!," whatever. If you were a member of Democracy Now!, you could actually—you could actually racially discriminate, as long as you were a private membership group. And I just stood there, and I’m thinking, "They’re sponsoring a contest on the life of Abraham Lincoln, this whites-only organization?" So I went and wrote a speech back in my room. I showed up at the contest, I gave it, and I won the contest. And then I had to—
AMY GOODMAN: An Elk wasn’t choosing?
MICHAEL MOORE: No, there was no Elks there. It was like a speech teacher. And the whole thing was slamming the Elks for doing this, and slamming Boys State: Why are you having these racists here at this, you know? Then I have to give the speech the next day at the boy governor inauguration. And there was—I had to sit next to the head Elk, who’s got big antlers coming out of his hat and a trophy in his lap that he’s going to present to me at the end of the speech. And I’m just thinking, "Oh, no, this is not going to end well."
And so, I gave the speech. And I turned and looked at him, and he’s just all beet red. His face is so angry. And I just said at the end of the speech—I just looked at him, and I said, "And I don’t want your stinkin’ trophy!" And the whole place erupted in applause. I ran off the stage, because I was worried he was going to hurt me. And from that, that very night on the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite, because it was out on the wire services that I did it, they did the story. And then it’s in the media for the rest of the—
AMY GOODMAN: You refused to talk to them.
MICHAEL MOORE: Yeah, they wanted me to come on, but now I was really—I know this is hard to believe, but I was really shy—a really shy kid. You know that a little bit about me, don’t you? Kind of? You know, on a personal level, I’m a very—like this, you know. And back then, I was worse. And so I didn’t go on—I didn’t go on the CBS Evening News, but they did the story anyways. And it caused this uproar all over the country. And we had a great, very liberal-left U.S. senator from Michigan named Philip Hart. And he called me, and he said, "I want to introduce a bill to fix this loophole in the Civil Rights Act, and I want you to come down and testify." And I’m like, "No, I’m not"—you know, I just told him my parents won’t let me leave the house. So, I didn’t go to D.C. to testify. But hearings were being held all over the country. A federal judge takes away the tax-exempt status of the Elks Club. And they start getting hit with all this stuff. Liquor licenses were being pulled from their clubs. A big hullabaloo. And a year and a half later, the Elks and all these private groups are finally forced to accept all Americans into their organization regardless of the color of their skin.
And it was such a lesson to learn at the age of 17—a dangerous lesson for me—that you could effect change by doing just a little tiny thing. And again, it was just what I said at the beginning here, is how we—you know, we’re told from the time we’re kids that we really—you can’t fight City Hall. You know, why knock your head against the wall? It’s not going to do anything. That’s the big lie. That’s the big lie, that we’re nobodies from nowhere and we can’t effect change. The truth is, is that we’re all somebody. We’re all from somewhere. And the thing that the wealthy elite establishment is afraid of is that if we ever figure out that there’s more of us than there are of them, they’re in big trouble. They know that, because the thing they must hate about this country—the rich—is it’s still—at least on paper, you know, in spite of the voter suppression, in spite of the gerrymandering, it’s still one person, one vote. That hasn’t been changed. So, and there’s only so many of them. There’s a hell of a lot more of us. And if we take that power in our hands, they’re in a boatload of trouble.
AMY GOODMAN: Do you think there are a lot more woke folks now?
MICHAEL MOORE: Oh, absolutely, absolutely. Look what happened the day after Trump’s travel ban. He announces this the week after his inauguration. The next day, tens of thousands of Americans—there was no organization to this, no leadership, no call for a demonstration, none of this. Just people, on their own, showed up at their local airport. Whether they lived in Hays, Kansas, or out at JFK, people just poured out to the airports with home-made signs against the travel ban. It’s a week—that was one week after the women’s marches all over the country, all over the world. No, I’ve been very hopeful in the sense that a lot of people have come alive, and nobody is going back to bed.
And that does it for our show. If you’d like to see the whole interview, go to democracynow.org. Well, if you’d like to get a copy of the show, you can go to democracynow.org, as well.
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