Hats off to Michael Moore, the morbidly obese commie creep who predicted Trump's victory, back in July

Yes, I know - that Michael Moore. When I read his article, "5 Reasons Why Trump Will Win", in July, I dismissed it as a ploy to scare the pants off left-wingers so they'd all go out and start campaigning like ferrets on speed in order to stop the man Moore called "This wretched, ignorant, dangerous part-time clown and full time sociopath" from becoming president. But, no - it turns out Moore's analysis of what voters would do in an election that was still three-and-a-half months off was pretty much spot on in every respect. Actually, scrub that - each and every one of the five "reasons" he gave for a likely Trump victory have (as far as one can tell) proved accurate. I urge everyone to read the article in its entirety (trigger warning: there's a YUUUUGGGE picture of Trump at the top of the page). But if you're too busy, here are Fat Bastard's five reasons:

1. Midwest Math, or Welcome to Our Rust Belt Brexit.  I believe Trump is going to focus much of his attention on the four blue states in the rustbelt of the upper Great Lakes – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Four traditionally Democratic states – but each of them have elected a Republican governor since 2010...

Trump carried every damn one of them.

2. The Last Stand of the Angry White Man. Our male-dominated, 240-year run of the USA is coming to an end... after having had to endure eight years of a black man telling us what to do, we’re supposed to just sit back and take eight years of a woman bossing us around? After that it’ll be eight years of the gays in the White House! Then the transgenders! You can see where this is going. By then animals will have been granted human rights and a fuckin’ hamster is going to be running the country. This has to stop!

Sort of right - I imagine that's the way some white male voters felt. 13% more women voted for Hillary, but 12% more men voted for Trump - a whopping 25% gender gap. Moore is allowing his prejudices full play here - I suspect it was more that fact that Obama was an utterly useless socialist rather than him being black that would have swayed male voters, just as it was more likely the fact that Hillary is a charmless, hectoring termagant who wanted to kill off the coal mining industry and surrounded herself with Black Lives Matter racists, entertainment industry low-lifes and Muslims rather than her sex which made men wary of her. (However, I accept that all the nonsense about transsexuals being allowed to use whichever toilet they fancy won't have gone down tremendously well with most blokes.)

3. The Hillary Problem...She is hugely unpopular — nearly 70% of all voters think she is untrustworthy and dishonest. She represents the old way of politics, not really believing in anything other than what can get you elected.

Check.

4. The Depressed Sanders Vote. Stop fretting about Bernie’s supporters not voting for Clinton – we’re voting for Clinton! The polls already show that more Sanders voters will vote for Hillary this year than the number of Hillary primary voters in ’08 who then voted for Obama. This is not the problem. The fire alarm that should be going off is that while the average Bernie backer will drag him/herself to the polls that day to somewhat reluctantly vote for Hillary, it will be what’s called a “depressed vote” – meaning the voter doesn’t bring five people to vote with her. He doesn’t volunteer 10 hours in the month leading up to the election. She never talks in an excited voice when asked why she’s voting for Hillary. 

I have no idea if this is how it turned out - but the sight of a young Sanders supporter laying into Hillary before being hustled off the stage at a Clinton rally just a few days ago did give one pause for thought.

The fifth reason Moore gives is particularly interesting:

5. The Jesse Ventura Effect. Finally, do not discount the electorate’s ability to be mischievous or underestimate how any millions fancy themselves as closet anarchists once they draw the curtain and are all alone in the voting booth. It’s one of the few places left in society where there are no security cameras, no listening devices, no spouses, no kids, no boss, no cops, there’s not even a friggin’ time limit. You can take as long as you need in there and no one can make you do anything. You can push the button and vote a straight party line, or you can write in Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. There are no rules. And because of that, and the anger that so many have toward a broken political system, millions are going to vote for Trump not because they agree with him, not because they like his bigotry or ego, but just because they can. 

That's very, very acute.

Obviously, Trump's tiny handful of media supporters have been predicting a win for months... but, then, that's what supporters do. Michael Moore isn't a Trump supporter (and that's putting it mildly), and he isn't really a Hillary supporter either (too militarily hawkish and right-wing for him), so he had no skin in this electoral game. Maybe that's why his (enormous) gut instinct proved so extraordinarily prophetic.

This is the first time I have ever praised Michael Moore. I promise it will be the last - but credit where it's due.