Michael Moore Says Donald Trump Ran for President Because Gwen Stefani Made More Money Than He Did

It’s almost insane to me that a few months before announcing his run for president, Donald Trump was a reality TV host. Also, Donald Trump is president after everyone saw what a tool he is on national TV for a decade. A lot of people have theorized that Trump never planned on actually being President of the United States, and that his run for office was just a way to raise his profile and a precursor to a launch of his own network in the vein of Sarah Palin.

Michael Moore has his own theory on what prompted Donald Trump to run for office, and it’s as plausible as any other theory I’ve ever heard; Moore told The Hollywood Reporter that Trump was upset to learn Gwen Stefani was getting paid more for The Voice than he was for The Apprentice and so he wanted to show NBC how valuable he was.

Fahrenheit 11/9 is his attempt to fully understand the forces that fueled Trump’s rise. Moore, being a humorist at heart, can’t resist starting with a mordant joke or two. Yes, he acknowledges factors like Russian President Vladimir Putin and former FBI head James Comey, but asserts that the person most responsible for the Trump presidency is … Gwen Stefani. “You hadn’t heard that before, have you?” Moore asks, delighted with the audacity of the claim.

Moore posits that when Trump realized Stefani’s performance fees as a coach on The Voice were larger than his own on The Apprentice, he staged his now-infamous Trump Tower campaign announcement to prove his popularity to NBC, which aired both shows. Says Moore, “He’d been talking about running for president since 1988, but he didn’t really want to be president. 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.” After Trump’s accusation that Mexico was sending rapists across the border, NBC cut ties with him. But Trump, suddenly finding himself cheered on by massive crowds and an indulgent media, figured why not make a serious run for the highest office in the land?

With everything we know about Donald Trump, that’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do. And about the amount of thought he’d likely put into it.