BEFORE: Nancy Pelosi carries over again from "Knock Down the House" and it seems that before I can go forward, politically speaking, I've got to look back. Today I'm watching a documentary all about the 2016 election, and the circumstances leading up to it. Again, the 2020 election documentaries have not been produced and released just yet.
Tomorrow TCM reaches the letter "S" in their A-to-Z schedule of Oscar-winning and Oscar-nominated movies. The ceremony is this Sunday, so they're just not going to reach the end of the alphabet in time, but that's OK. Here's the breakdown for tomorrow, April 24:
7:30 am "Royal Wedding" (1951) - SEEN IT
9:30 am "San Francisco" (1936)
11:45 am "The Sandpiper" (1965) - SEEN IT
2:00 pm "The Sea Wolf" (1941)
4:00 pm "The Search" (1948)
5:30 pm "The Secret of Santa Vittoria" (1969)
8:00 pm "Sergeant York" (1941) - SEEN IT
10:30 pm "Seven Brides for Seven Brothers" (1954) - SEEN IT
12:30 am "7 Faces of Dr. Lao" (1964)
2:15 am "Shadow of a Doubt" (1943) - SEEN IT
4:15 am "Shaft" (1971)
Hitting big with 5 seen out of 11 tomorrow, that's almost half, and it raises me to 111 seen out of 278, or 39.9%, almost back to 40%. I'm a bit embarrassed to say I've never watched the original "Shaft", just the remake with Samuel L. Jackson.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Fahrenheit 11/9" (Movie #3,279) (today is Michael Moore's birthday, BTW)
THE PLOT: In 2016, any poll you consulted pointed to a Hillary Clinton landslide, so this balanced documentary seeks to answer one question - How the hell did Donald Trump win?
AFTER: This is one of those films that's 50% interviews, 50% archival footage, and about 125% Monday morning quarterbacking. The hot thing now seems to be proving that you KNEW Trump was going to get elected, and you were able to say that in print or on TV before anybody else. "August 2020, that's when I knew Trump was going to get elected." "When the Access Hollywood footage came out and had no impact, that's when I knew Trump was going to get elected." "April, that's when I knew..." Produce the footage of yourself saying that, or it didn't happen...but how could everybody have known, if nobody knew? OK, the polls got it wrong, what happened, did the polls just ask the wrong people? Or were people saying one thing and doing another and how do we prevent it from happening again?
This does come across as a rather comprehensive field guide to what happened in the months leading up to the 2016 election, from Trump riding that escalator down to announce he was going to run, right up to the late-night surprise results coming in, and the distressed Hillary campaigners leaving the Javits Center late on Election Night without any satisfaction. I stayed up late, as I usually do, and I watched the results come in, which then presented me with a dilemma - do I wake up my wife and tell her the bad news, or let her have one last night of solid, untroubled sleep? I chose the latter. Four miserable years later, I repeated the process on Election Night 2020, with (ultimately, a few weeks later) better results.
Here are the basic tenets this film postulates, as background for how we got there:
1) TRUMP NEVER WANTED TO WIN. Not at first, anyway. His candidacy wasn't meant to be serious, he'd sort of half-suggested many times before that he would run for President, but never followed through. But with the failure of Trump Air, Trump Steaks, Trump casinos, and Trump University, he saw a way to increase his visibility and extend his "brand" into politics, but at the start of his campaign, nobody took him seriously, least of all himself. However, once he started, and connected with large groups of people at rallies, it became a gratifying sort of feedback loop, where he fed off the crowds and told them what they wanted to hear in return, and that fed his ego in the most addictive way, making him crave more attention, and he'd do nearly anything to get it.
2) TRUMP CONNECTED WITH THE LOWER CLASS. This was a tough one for the pundits to figure out, obviously there was financial dissatisfaction across the country, and for Democrats, Bernie Sanders would eventually ride the same wave that resulted from economic disparity between the haves and the have-nots. The film suggests that Sanders and Trump were like opposite sides of the same coin, which leads one to wonder what could have been if they'd faced each other in the election. But somehow, against all reason, the lower class came to admire the NYC billionaire who lived in a golden tower - perhaps it was because he ate buckets KFC on his jet and also loved McDonald's food. Why, he's just like us?
3) HIGH VISIBILITY / SOCIAL MEDIA. All the other Republican candidates were starting nearly from scratch. Sure, people in Texas knew who Ted Cruz was, people in Florida already knew Marco Rubio. But EVERYBODY already knew Trump, he'd been around for years, on the NYC gossip scene, magazines, "The Apprentice", wrestling matches. And somehow it didn't matter that he was a rich, rude pig, at least he was believable and honest, because that's who he was. The other Republican candidates had advisers who told them how to dress, what to say, what to eat, and Trump didn't care, he just went on being his unapologetic self. Then came the rallies, which often came to resemble WWE events - and you've probably seen how popular wrestling events were. Trump-a-Mania was running wild. Then came Twitter, and...
4) SAYING OUTRAGEOUS THINGS. Tweets that were misspelled and in ALL CAPS. Making fun of a reporter with a disability. The rude nicknames for his competition, from "Lyin' Ted" and "Little Marco" to "Sleepy Jeb" and "Crooked Hillary". It became a giant game of "Trump can't really say that, can he?" Oh, but he could, and he did, and it didn't matter whether it was true or not. You throw enough mud at your opponents, and some of it's going to stick. By the time the other candidates learned to throw it back, it was too late, and they were terrible at it. Again, years of advisers telling the candidates how to act properly, and then Trump just cut them all down, one by one, ending both the Bush AND Clinton dynasties with his personal slams. Degrading John McCain, making fun of Carly Fiorina's appearance, even going back to the classics, like calling Rosie O'Donnell a "fat pig", and each time people thought, "Oh, THIS time he's gone too far, there's no coming back from this..." and they were always wrong. This was a reality show that people found fascinating, like "Cops" or "World's Wildest Car Crashes", and they kept tuning in to see how bad the next crash was going to be.
5) WHAT-ABOUT-ISM. Every time somebody tried to take him down, Trump just pointed the finger back at his accusers. All those women who claimed sexual assault charges against him? He'd just point out the similar bad record of Bill Clinton, during the debates with Hillary. And it's not even her FAULT that her husband cheated on her, or did whatever with Monica or Paula, etc. How could that possibly reflect badly on her? Somehow, it did, and this brings up:
6) THE HILLARY PROBLEM. Hillary Clinton had waited years for this opportunity, so long that she felt she deserved the 2016 nomination (Joe Biden took a pass in 2016, so now we have to wonder what could have been...). Sure, Hillary had years of service as First Lady, Secretary of State, a NY Senator, but that didn't make her a shoo-in for President. There was still the matter of her husband's affairs, which, again, shouldn't reflect badly on her in theory, but what was up with that relationship? Did they have an open marriage, or was she just the cheated-on spouse who forgave him? And if that's the case, which played better with the public, forgiving her husband or throwing him to the curb and getting a divorce? People probably say they understand option 1, because it preserves "family values", but I suspect more people would have respected her if she'd thrown Bill's ass out, filed for divorce and acted like the strong, independent woman she claimed to be. Then there was her personality problem, even with her impressive resume that didn't mean people would automatically, you know, LIKE her. She often came off as fakey, too rehearsed and therefore insincere, plus all attempts at humor didn't seem to work for her...
7) THE HILLARY PROBLEM, Part 2. Scandals, many of which were manufactured by the opposition, no doubt. Benghazi, which was a joke. The e-mail server, which was another joke, and nothing was ever proven to be wrong with the missing e-mails. The lack of evidence is not evidence, necessarily, but try telling that to Trump. He strongly implied this had something to do with Russia, which it didn't. And then Comey re-opened the investigation just weeks before the election, why? Because he said he "didn't want to interfere with the election", which made no sense. If he didn't want to interfere, he should have done nothing, and once again, nothing came from this, but just re-opening the case in October was bad enough.
8) THE HILLARY PROBLEM, Part 3. That sense of entitlement, that feeling that came from being up in the polls, the illusion that her election was a "done deal" or was "in the bag", and allowed her to slack off a little bit, not visiting states like Wisconsin and Michigan, traditional Democratic strongholds, forming the "blue wall" with Pennsylvania included, and this turned out to be a huge mistake. So she stayed home to prep for the debates, meanwhile Trump was holding rallies in those states that drew 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 people each. Where were the Hillary rallies? Nowhere, she preferred to meet with small groups of donors in places like the Hamptons, and that didn't help with the perception that she was part of the establishment. Trump's rallies, being some combination of prop/insult comedy, WWE-style taunting and Nazi-like propaganda, were events tailor-made for the common man.
9) BERNIE SANDERS. There was a point where Bernie started gaining ground in the Democratic primaries, he came to the Democratic Convention with a fair number of delegates, only to be told that he needed to do "the right thing" for the party and endorse Hillary. Umm, why? Just because it's her turn? That's not how the system is supposed to work, we're supposed to let the people vote in primaries and treat those results as if they have meaning. If Bernie won a few states, those are his delegates and HE gets to decide what to do with them. There were possible solutions, other than the one we got. He could have joined the ticket as the VP candidate, for example, this would have kept his many younger fans in the fold. By making Bernie give up his delegates, do you think his Democratic supporters - 10%, 20%, whatever it was - would be more likely to embrace Hillary's message, or the similar anti-establishment message that Trump was broadcasting?
10) ELECTORAL COLLEGE - this one's been covered at length before, because we have this crazy system where every state HAS to have a winner for some reason, and it was allegedly designed to help the smaller states, but honestly, I don't see how this system does that, it only seems to give more power to the bigger states. Like, you just can't win without California and Texas plus three other states, so how is that fair? Doesn't this mean that only the people who live in the more populous states are deciding the election? Trump lost the popular vote, don't forget, by like A LOT, and instead put together the right combination of states that would give him an electoral college total that was over the breaking point. Hillary's people knew how many electors each state had, were they counting differently or something?
Trump was essentially able to say, "Ha ha, I don't NEED the popular vote, because the people who support me live in the right places." This all seems rather arbitrary and counter-productive, but it's one of those "leaky roof" problems, where nobody's going to try and fix it now because there's no election coming up, and then when there IS an election coming up, nobody's going to try and fix it because it's too close to the election. SO, it will never get fixed. I don't fault Trump for taking advantage of the electoral college, because it kind of reminds me of how I graduated early from college, and game recognizes game. NYU told me I had to come up with an idea for a senior thesis film, but after my junior year, I realized that thanks to AP credits from high school, I had enough credits to graduate, thus saving thousands on tuition. Senior thesis? No thanks, but I will take that diploma, which I've earned. I pretty much "electoral colleged" out of my senior year with 6 science credits, 6 math credits, 3 from art history and I think the results from Wisconsin and Arizona put me over the top.
Anyway, the "winner-take-all" process in each state seems to be in conflict with the "one person, one vote" ideal that we were promised as U.S. citizens. If you're a Republican in a blue state like California, or a Democrat in a red state like Texas, your vote just goes into the void, there's got to be a feeling that maybe your vote didn't count. A couple times people have tried to game the system and "trade votes" with someone in another state, but then there's no guarantee that the other voter will honor their commitment. Two states use a slightly different method, Maine and Nebraska, and they split the state's electors between the parties, whichever candidate wins an electoral district wins one electoral vote, and that seems fairer? Maybe it's time to try this method with all the states, so if there are heavily Republican districts in California then it essentially becomes a "purple" state, and the Republican candidate might win a few of that state's 55 Electoral votes, and if there's a Democratic enclave in Texas, some Dem candidate might be awarded some of that state's 38 Electoral votes. And this way more citizens might feel like there votes are making a difference, because the current system is just encouraging people to move to other states for their votes to count, and that kind of thinking ends with a Civil War, I bet.
11) RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE. Honestly, we still just don't know about this one. Was Russia colluding with Donald Trump to take the American system down? Or were they just buying Facebook ads and sending tweets with bad grammar to muddy the waters? The only people proven to be in the pockets of the Russkis were Michael Flynn and Paul Manafort, and then the investigations just sort of...stopped? I don't know, you never hear about this any more now that everybody who worked for Trump got a pardon, and there's no point in prosecuting any more. So we know that the Russians interfered, but we don't know how effective it all was, did it sway the election by 5%? 10%? Just a few electors in swing states? Still, that might have been enough, because of the Electoral College.
12. GARY JOHNSON and JILL STEIN. Just kidding, these candidates couldn't have been less effective if they tried. Neither one got any electoral votes, so they didn't matter. Johnson got 3% of the popular vote, but that didn't matter either, Hillary won the popular vote, remember? Anyway, that doesn't decide things because of #10. If there has to be a #12 reason, it's because Trump told Americans what he thought they wanted to hear, and they believed him, even though it was all a pack of lies.
My favorite comment on the 2016 election came from a stand-up special, I wish I could remember which comedian did this routine where he described the two candidates as very different cars available on a dealer's lot, with Clinton represented by the station wagon with wood paneling, or maybe it was a minivan with a high safety rating, while Donald Trump was best represented by an orange Ferrari. You just KNOW buying the Ferrari is a bad idea, you'll probably end up with it wrapped around a tree, but still, it's flashy, loud, appealing and it sure gets your attention. A lot of people maybe went into the voting booth knowing they should get the minivan, but secretly wishing they could buy the Ferrari. A lot of them probably just went for it in the booth, said, "You know what? YOLO, screw it, I'm voting for Trump. What's the WORST that could possibly happen?" Yeah, well, now we know. Next time, get the minivan.
Anyway, I knew back in summer of 2015 that Hillary couldn't win, I was saying that she had too much baggage and too many negatives before Trump even got into the race. Ask any of my friends and co-workers, they'll confirm this. But who listens to me?
Also starring Scott Adams (yes, the Dilbert cartoonist), John Avlon, Molly Ball, Amy Chozick, Kellyanne Conway, Michael D'Antonio, Susan Del Percio, Mary Katharine Ham, Van Jones, Allan Lichtman, Frank Luntz, Richard Miniter, Piers Morgan (last seen in "Always at the Carlyle"), David Pakman, Deb Roy, April Ryan, Anthony Scaramucci, Matt Schlapp, Steve Schmidt, Aaron Sorkin, Jerry Springer, Joe Trippi, Jonathan Wackrow,
with archive footage of Huma Abedin, Bret Baier, Steve Bannon, Adrienne Batra, Joy Behar (last seen in "Hall Pass"), Wolf Blitzer (last seen in "The Report") Jon Bon Jovi, Mika Brzezinski (last seen in "David Crosby: Remember My Name"), Jeb Bush (last seen in "Get Me Roger Stone"), Ben Carson (ditto), Ted Cruz (ditto), Chris Christie, Bill Clinton (last seen in "John Lewis: Good Trouble"), Hillary Clinton (ditto), Marcia Fudge (ditto), Barack Obama (ditto), Michelle Obama (ditto), Stephen Colbert (last seen in "Becoming"), Gayle King (ditto), Bill O'Reilly (ditto), Oprah Winfrey (ditto) James Comey, Anderson Cooper (last seen in "The Wizard of Lies"), Ann Coulter (last seen in "All In: the Fight for Democracy"), Steve Doocy (ditto), Brian Kilmeade (ditto), Rachel Maddow (ditto), Scott Pelley (ditto), Mike Pence (ditto), Donald Trump (ditto), Simon Cowell (last seen in "Clive Davis: The Soundtrack of Our Lives"), Larry David (last seen in "Whatever Works"), Ellen DeGeneres (last heard in "Finding Dory"), Robert De Niro (last seen in "Drillbit Taylor"), Jimmy Fallon (last seen in "Fyre Fraud"), Jay-Z (ditto), Taran Killam (ditto), Charlie Rose (ditto), Carly Fiorina, Major Garrett, Willie Geist, Rudy Giuliani (last seen in "Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm"), Kim Jong-un (ditto), Whoopi Goldberg (last seen in "Top Five"), Lindsey Graham, Darrell Hammond (last seen in "Blues Brothers 2000"), Elisabeth Hasselbeck (last seen in "Made of Honor"), John Heilemann, Mike Huckabee, Wyclef Jean, Boris Johnson, Tim Kaine, John Kasich, Megyn Kelly, Larry King (last seen in "Fahrenheit 11/9"), Bernie Sanders (ditto) Beyonce Knowles (last seen in "The Lion King" (2019), Jared Kushner (last seen in "Rigged: The Voter Suppression Playbook"), David Muir (ditto), George Stephanopoulos (ditto), Melania Trump (ditto), Chris Wallace (ditto), Lady Gaga (last seen in "A Star Is Born"), Matt Lauer (last seen in "Whitney"), Barbara Walters (ditto), Don Lemon (last seen in "Warrior"), Bill Maher (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Chris Matthews (last seen in "State of Play"), Bob Schieffer (ditto), Paul McCartney (last seen in "A Very Murray Christmas"), Seth Meyers (last seen in "Bombshell"), Tim Miller, Les Moonves, Norah O'Donnell, Rand Paul, Rick Perry, John Podesta, Ron Reagan, Harry Reid, Mitt Romney, David Rothschild, Marco Rubio, Rick Santorum, Joe Scarborough (also carrying over from "Knock Down the House"), Sherri Shepherd (last seen in "One for the Money"), Nate Silver, Howard Stern, Margaret Sullivan, Jake Tapper (last seen in "Late Night"), Chuck Todd, Donald Trump Jr., Eric Trump, Ivanka Trump, Cecilia Vega, Meredith Vieira, Jeff Zeleny, Jeff Zucker,
RATING: 6 out of 10 racist immigration bans
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