Michael Moore Says Gwen Stefani Inspired Donald Trump’s Presidential Run

Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Michael Moore Says Gwen Stefani Inspired Donald Trump’s Presidential Run

Patrick McMullan via Getty Images

Michael Moore’s latest polemic documentary Fahrenheit 11/9, which deals with the impact of Donald Trump’s presidency, is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival today. (Or as Moore explains in his Twitter bio, “It’s a comedy/horror documentary that’ll reveal how this madness happened & how to end it.”) He promoted the movie with a new interview in The Hollywood Reporter, and it includes at least one music-related bombshell.

The filmmaker insists that Trump’s presidential run directly resulted from his desire to compete with Gwen Stefani, his fellow NBC TV personality at the time. As Moore tells it, Trump realized Stefani’s performance fees as a coach on The Voice were higher than what NBC was paying him for The Apprentice. Thus, in an attempt to prove his popularity to the network, he staged his Trump Tower press conference announcing his candidacy. Things spiraled from there: Trump alienated NBC by suggesting Mexico was sending rapists over the border, and with large crowds cheering him on and the media covering his every move, he figured he might as well run. Again, this is Moore’s version of the events.

“He’d been talking about running for president since 1988, but he didn’t really want to be president,” Moore told THR. “There’s no penthouse in the White House. And he doesn’t want to live in a black city. He was trying to pit NBC against another network, but it just went off the rails.”

The upside of all this is that we all get to see the above photo of Stefani with the Trumps in 2005 and say, “Hey, there’s Gavin Rossdale!” With that in mind, this story reminds us that it is indeed, the little things that kill.

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