Afghanistan ’will boost Biden’: Michael Moore

High profile filmmaker Michael Moore predicts Joe Biden’s standing will improve amid praise for his bravery for ending the war in Afghanistan.

Filmmaker Michael Moore thinks the US’s bungled Afghanistan withdrawal will be merely a “footnote” in five months’ time. Picture: Getty Images

High profile American filmmaker Michael Moore has predicted the US withdrawal from Afghanistan will boost President Biden’s electoral standing, as the US president suffers further hits to his approval rating.

Mr Moore, who famously predicted Donald Trump would win the 2016 presidential election months earlier, said the perception the withdrawal was bungled would be a “footnote five months from now”.

“History will portray Biden as a courageous individual who was very brave in standing up against all the cries for continuing the war,” he said,

“I speak as a lifetime supporter of Bernie Sanders, I didn’t vote for Joe in the Primary; I am giving credit where credit is due. They say honeymoon is over, I still think it’s still going on,” he added.

President Biden’s approval rating, consistently above 50 per cent since moving in the White House in January, has dropped sharply to as low as 45 per cent across the major polls compiled by RealClearPolitics over the past few weeks.

Only former presidents Donald Trump and Gerald Ford, who each had 37 per cent approval ratings at the same point in their administrations, have endured lower approval.

Democrats are trying to shift the debate away from Afghanistan back toward the President’s US$3.5 trillion infrastructure agenda, a plan increasingly in doubt as critical Congressional Democrats threaten not to support the bill amid fears about rising inflation.

“Those polls out showing approval rating going down: it’s only because Americans are in the midst of chaos right now, not just Afghanistan, the hurricanes and Covid,” Mr Moore said, interviewed by MSNBC, a major US network.

“When you got a lot of bummer stuff going on, people aren’t going to give happy answers,” he added.

US President Joe Biden speaks with a union worker in, Delaware yesterday. Picture: AFP

Unvaccinated Americans have been warned by the Centre for Disease Control not to travel this US Labor Day long weekend, the unofficial end of the summer break, as new Covid-19 cases and hospitalisations rise back to levels not seen since January, and far above peaks reached throughout 2020.

Mr Moore, 67, who shot to global prominence with his 2004 film Fahrenheit 9/11, which slammed former President George Bush’s invasion of Iraq, said the Taliban had won the Afghanistan war.

“In the end Bin Laden won, because the evil genius drew us over there, and we lost not only thousands of young men and women, we spent $300m a day for 20 years,” he said.

“Yes [Bin Laden] is dead, and al Qaeda are in tatters, but we passed the Patriot Act to reduce our freedoms … he knew we would take away our own rights and it would divide us,” he added.

The President issued another disaster declaration on Monday, for the state of New York, as Hurricane Ida continued to rampage across the US, having already killed at least 67 people across eight US states.

More than three quarters Americans supported the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan, according to a Washington Post-ABC poll published on Friday, but 60 per cent disapproved of President Biden’s handling of it.

Up to 200 Americans remain in Afghanistan and 13 American soldiers, and hundreds of Afghans, were killed in an ISIS-K terrorist attack.

Mr Moore said the fact the last US soldier to leave Afghanistan, Major General Chris Donahue, captured on video walking up the ramp of a US C130 aircraft, wasn’t worried about being shot, was a symbol of the successful withdrawal.

“How did he know he wasn’t going to get shot? … because [the US] negotiated with the Taliban to make sure 124,000 people could get out safely, and not one of those planes would be shot down out of the air,” he said.

Moore has come under attack this year from climate change activists for producing a documentary, Planet of the Humans, viewed more than 11.7 million times, that ridiculed solar and wind power as a source of base load energy.