The America I Want to Save Is the America We’ve Never Had

A Thanksgiving Eve Message from Michael Moore

Constructing the Statue of Liberty, assembling it piece by piece, 1886

Friends,

This morning it was announced that it appears the final count may now be in — and Trump has FAILED to win a majority of the popular vote. His final total, as of now, will be under 50% — or 49.83%.

This was no landslide. It was the smallest percentage of a popular vote victory in a Presidential election since Richard Nixon in 1968.

Here’s how little we lost by:

Just 12 votes per precinct across the entire United States!

That’s it. With Harris behind by just 2.4 million votes out of the 152 million who voted, that’s an average of just 12 votes per precinct across the nearly 200,000 precincts in the U.S.

Is there anybody reading this who believes we can’t get just 12 more people out in our part of town to vote next time? Exactly! C’mon, yes, we just got a kick in the gut, it super sucks, we’ve got a real fight ahead of us — but we’re only a dozen people short per precinct! Is it really worth giving up? You’re just 12 raffle tickets short for the new band uniforms! You only need 12 more people to sell out the school play! You are just 12 pages short of finishing your first novel! Get a grip! Snap out of it! The administration Trump is currently forming — it’s like one of us wrote this script and he is unbelievably following it to the exact word! The Wrestling Lady will run our schools! The guy who beheads a whale, straps it to the top of his car and drops a dead bear he wanted to eat off in Central Park will be in charge of all our Health and Human Services! The weekend guy on Fox and Friends will be in charge of our 2 million soldiers and launching our nuclear missiles! And we actually got one of our own, an ex-Bernie campaigning Congresswoman who we all know really well, a crazed but lovely Hawaiian who looked higher than you at that Phish concert, to be in charge of all of our spy agencies! Yes!

Don’t ask me how we’ve pulled all this off. I keep pinching myself! One person who works at the White House told me this week, “Dude! How’d you guys mastermind this? With this set up, Trump’s presidency is going to crumble within 18 months!”

I didn’t like that. A lot of hurt will be enacted over 18 months. We’ll try to come up with more stuff that’ll shut him down by July.

In the meantime, about a month ago on Halloween, I posted free of charge my “How We Ended Up with Trump the First Time and How We Can Rid Ourselves of Him” movie — Fahrenheit 11/9 — on YouTube. Free to all. It was the Thursday before the Election, the last weekend before the Election, our final six days to try and get out the same vote we mobilized 4 years ago — to convince the majority that is already on our side NOT to take it for granted that Trump was going to lose and that they didn’t need to show up to the polls. Everyone had to show up! We failed to make that happen. 2.4 million of those who stood with us against Trump in 2020 decided to stay home. They felt abandoned and uninspired by a remarkable 107-day campaign led by perhaps the smartest person in our lifetime to run for President who, for those 107 days, embraced Wall Street (“I’m a Capitalist!”), hugged billionaires, toured swing states holding hands with “repentant” war-mongering Republicans, bragged about owning a Glock and spoke less and less about banning AR-15s. And in the final weeks, there were fewer labor leaders invited on stage, the campaign no longer addressed the true anger of the working class, it failed to promise a crackdown on inflation — greed-flation — with prosecutorial zeal and strict price controls by jailing corporate executives who jack up prices in order to post record profits. The campaign grew quiet about how heavily it was going to tax the rich, there was little talk about how the planet may have reached the point of no return in the climate catastrophe, or why was it that my factory worker father could afford to buy a house upon returning home from WWII, or I, with my high school education, could buy one at 24 — and yet I don’t know a single goddamn person under 40 today who owns their own home! The Democrats stopped promising old people a real increase in social security, refused to promise young people a debt-free college education, and for 30 years did nothing to give the working poor a real raise in the minimum wage — even though they had a Democrat in the Oval Office for over half of those years.

STOP PRETENDING TO BE SURPRISED THAT 2.4 MILLION WORKING CLASS DEMOCRATIC VOTERS STAYED HOME!!

Seriously, how do you lose an election to a fascist nutter when, according to every poll, the vast majority of Americans support legalizing abortion, banning assault weapons, guaranteeing paid family leave, free pre-K education, taxing the rich, term limits on the Supreme Court, ending gerrymandering and the Electoral College, removing money from politics, supporting labor unions, and demanding an immediate ceasefire in Gaza. That’s us. The MAJORITY of Americans.

But we fell short — by a minuscule 1.6% of the total vote. We failed to convince our disappointed and depressed friends and neighbors to help us in this last-chance effort to stop a madman from returning to office.

It is now Thanksgiving. Tomorrow, millions of us will gather around the table with family and in-laws and friends. In many cases, there will be a Trump voter or several Trump voters sitting around the table with you. I know there are many, many, many of you who just can’t bear it, who can’t deal with the racism, the misogyny, the… well, the even more misogyny any longer — those of you who are boycotting the family Thanksgiving, or who’ve made other plans to enjoy the long weekend in peace and reflection, spending (charging) ridiculous sums on Black Friday, or who plan on just pulling the covers over your heads until it turns December.

All of us are still taking time to think about what exactly we can do next. What each of us can do to resist the coming storm. What each of us can do to get motivated and find hope for the fight ahead. We cannot give up, so we must find a way to resist, to stop them, to protect the vulnerable amongst us, to win in 2026 and in 2028. After our devastating loss to W. in 2004, we came back in 2006 and flipped both the House AND the Senate. And 2 years after that we elected the first African American president, the only candidate who opposed the Iraq War. We will come up with a strong and successful plan of action. I will help write that plan.

In the meantime, I will also leave Fahrenheit 11/9 up on YouTube in full for free and available indefinitely. The film will show you what we needed to do the last time Trump took office. There are good lessons we need to re-learn. You can watch it at this link on YouTube or right here:

Please watch this if only to be reminded that we must not wait for the Democratic Party to get its act together or to finally shrug off their corporate overlords and fight the right fight. We hold immense power in our hands — and we rarely act as if we know that.

This is a movie about resistance and a reminder of what is truly at stake in these “United States.”

As I say toward the end of the film, “the America I want to save is the America we’ve never had.” It’s time we take our majority and build that America.

— Mike

P.S. Again — for the third time in 8 years, by a vote of the American people, Trump lost a majority of the popular vote!

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