Republican Donald Trump won the presidential election by a comfortable margin in the electoral college, but lost the popular vote by some 2.7 million votes. This, along with Trump’s divisive rhetoric, has galvanized various groups to negate or, at least, seek to diminish his approaching presidency.
One prominent figure among these groups is the iconoclastic political activist Michael Moore. The film documentarian appeared on Late Night with Seth Meyers December 8 to insist that he would "lead the charge" against keeping Trump out of the White House. "Fifty four percent of the voters didn’t want Donald Trump… the majority of Americans do not want him in the White House," Moore told Meyers, after adding the votes from third-party candidates Jill Stein and Gary Johnson.
Moore has launched what he calls the #DisruptJ20 campaign to organize and execute mass protest in Washington DC during Trump’s inauguration. The organization’s website states that “Trump stands for tyranny, greed, and misogyny. He is the champion of neo-nazis and white Nationalists, of the police who kill the Black, Brown and poor on a daily basis, of racist border agents and sadistic prison guards, of the FBI and NSA who tap your phone and read your email.”
The website takes a clearly demarcated "with-us-or-against-us" stance on Trump’s presidency, calling for corporations to "openly declare whether they side with [Trump] or with the people who will suffer at his hands." #DisruptJ20 groups Trump with "the KKK, Vladimir Putin, Golden Dawn, and the Islamic State," all of whom "cheered his victory."
The organization has banned law enforcement and journalists from participating. Lacy MacAuley, a #DisruptJ20 spokeswoman, explained the ban to WND: "Our meetings are safe zones in which people want to speak freely without knowing that a police officer is listening, or thinking that they could be quoted in the press. This is especially important when Trump and Trump-affiliated people threaten intermittently to violate our freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression."
#DisruptJ20 will coincide with the Women’s March on Washington, whose website states that their mission is to "send a bold message to our new administration on their first day in office, and to the world that women's rights are human rights." At the time of this writing, over 138,000 people have, on Facebook, declared their intent to join the march.
Moore caused a stir in July when he presciently predicted that Trump would win the presidency by carrying the states of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Ohio, sometimes called the Rust Belt. Most predictions had Democrat Hillary Clinton carrying all four.
