Filmmaker Michael Moore wants to you to think of Mel Gibson when you look at Donald Trump.

It’s for your own good, people, if you want to understand the mind of the man who constantly does crazy things like threaten the “ruination” of Canada is he doesn’t get the trade deal he wants.

“Trump is completely Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies,” the firebrand Michigan filmmaker says, holding forth in an interview Saturday at the Toronto International Film Festival.

“You know how he gets the gun away from the bad guy, by pretending he’s crazy?” Moore punctuates his words with Three Stooges-style woo-woo-woo, nyah-nyah-nyah sounds.

“Boom! He’s got the gun. So Mel Gibson goes all crazy cop, the bad guy is going ‘WTF is going on here?’ And all of a sudden, the bad guy doesn’t have his gun any more.”

Trump is crazy like a fox, in other words, and that’s one of the main messages Moore wants to get through with Fahrenheit 11/9, his new movie which had its world premiere Thursday at TIFF 2018. Moore’s latest tries to answer that same question the bad guy asks — “WTF?” — regarding how America ended up with Trump as president.

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And in coming up with answers both comical and serious, Moore may surprise viewers by arguing there’s more than one villain in this story — and at least a couple of the baddies are people you’d likely never suspect. Trump is indeed a very bad president, he says, but “Donald Trump didn’t just fall from the sky.”

Complacency on the part of regular people and political parties, along with complicity by ratings-hungry media, not just in the U.S. but everywhere, contributed to a slide in societal values and a thirst for sensation that led to the elevating of a reality TV star to the most powerful job in the world. To quote a famous line from Pogo, that most American of comic strips: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

The title Fahrenheit 11/9 is a hat tip to Moore’s Oscar-winning 2004 doc about America’s stumbling efforts in the so-called “War on Terror,” but it’s also a direct numerical reference to Nov. 9, 2016. In the wee hours of that day, the presidential election was called in Trump’s favour. He had overcome long odds to defeat his rival Hillary Clinton, not by the popular vote — he trailed her by three million ballots — but by the electoral college system of winner-take-all state ballots, a legacy of the slave era originally designed to protect racist southern interests.

Moore makes merry with hubris, showing scene after scene of political pundits, movie and rock stars and journalists declaring there was no way Clinton could lose the presidency and no hope of Trump even coming close.

“He’s playing us constantly,” the director told the Star on Saturday. “He outsmarted the Democratic Party. He outsmarted Hillary. Nobody took him seriously, except for a few people. I did.”

The film displays damning statistics: 63 million ballots in the popular vote for Clinton, 60 million for Trump and another 100 million potential votes which were never cast, for a variety of reasons, and which could have changed history had they been cast. Then, the director posits the amusing theory — one that actually isn’t completely far-fetched, knowing Trump’s penchant for one-upmanship — that pop star Gwen Stefani is to blame for the carrot-topped egotist’s bid for the presidency.

Trump, the theory goes, found out that Stefani was getting paid more for episodes of The Voice than he was for The Apprentice, and he tried to call NBC’s bluff with a presidential bid that would prove his popularity and force NBC to pay him more money. A couple of ecstatic public rallies later, Trump decided he was seriously in the game, although Moore argues that, deep down, the man never really wanted to be president.

There’s an abrupt segue about 40 minutes into this two-hour doc, switching from Trump’s antics (“Did you want to look at Trump for two hours? I didn’t,” the director said Saturday) to the trauma of Flint, Mich., Moore’s hometown. The auto-building city has suffered mightily from abandonment by General Motors and by degradation of the water supply, the latter due to a monumentally foolish decision by Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican crony and pal of Trump’s.

Snyder disconnected Flint’s water supply from the safety of Lake Huron to the toxicity of the Flint River, a cost-cutting move his officials tried to downplay and also cover up, even as the water was poisoning thousands of adults and children. Moore’s film introduces us to a whistle-blower in the bureaucracy who refused to falsify test results that showed sky-high levels of lead in many Flint residents.

But perhaps the most shocking villain, if you want to call him that, whom Moore calls out is former president Barack Obama, who is seen visiting Flint and blithely accepting Snyder’s claim that Flint’s water is now safe to drink (it’s not, even today). Obama is twice seen pretending to drink from glasses of Flint water, but he actually barely sips from them, and he blithely accepts Snyder’s assurances, much to the fury of Flint residents interviewed afterwards.

Enraged by what happened to his hometown, Moore fills up a tanker truck with Flint water and drives to Snyder’s mansion, where he proceeds to spray that contents onto the governor’s lawn and driveway in an amusingly cathartic gesture.

This then leads to the scattershot third section of the film, the weakest of the three, in which Moore yields to bad humour — comparison between Trump and Hitler is as obvious as it is overdone — and also examines all manner of societal ills, school shootings among them.

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He visits with surviving students of the mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. earlier this year, who have now become vocal advocates for gun control. At the end of Thursday’s packed screening, Moore brought three of the students onto the Ryerson Theatre stage, along with the Flint water whistle-blower and her husband, to enthusiastic applause.

Moore admitted on Thursday that he has a utopian mind beneath his baseball cap and above his blue collar: “The America I want to save is the America we’ve never had.” But he’d also like to have some muscle on his side, and he proposes a new job for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is no meek pugilist in the boxing ring.

“Thank you for your prime minster,” Moore told the Toronto audience. “I’d like to see him go three rounds in the ring with our guy.”

Fahrenheit 11/9 is set to open Sept. 21 at TIFF Bell Lightbox for a post-festival run.

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