Aaron Sorkin Tells Michael Moore Trying to Relate to Trump Supporters Is Like Being ‘An Apologist for Racists’

Filmmaker Aaron Sorkin said in an interview with director Michael Moore that trying to understand former President Donald Trump’s supporters was similar to being an “apologist for racists.”

He made the remarks on Moore’s podcast with a reference to his stage adaptation of the 1960 novel To Kill A Mockingbird, and its main character, Atticus Finch.

“Upon reading the novel again, it struck me that throughout the novel, Atticus is an apologist for racists,” Sorkin said. “His whole thing about you have to walk a mile in someone’s else’s shoes. You really have to get inside someone’s skin and crawl around before you can really understand them. That was a way of excusing Bob Ewell. ‘Well, you got to understand, he lost his WPA job, and that really brings a man down.’ He excuses his neighbor, Mrs. Henry Dubose. A terrible racist. ‘Well you got to understand, she stopped taking her pain medication, her morphine, that makes people a little crazy.’ He excuses the whole South.

“All you had to do, Mike, was look around. We were all saying the same thing about the tens of millions of people supporting Donald Trump,” Sorkin said. “I don’t get it. Yeah, we’ve always disagreed, all of us here in America. But we all have eyes and ears, right? We’re looking at the same person. What are you talking about?”

Sorkin’s screenplays include Charlie Wilson’s War and The Social Network. Moore, an outspoken liberal whose work includes Fahreinheit 9/11, opposed Trump throughout his term in office, but correctly predicted that he would win the 2016 election thanks to his support in the Rust Belt, including from Moore’s home state of Michigan.

“The audience is responding gutturally,” Moore told Sorkin. “You hear it every night — every three nights I saw it, the way the audience shifted in their seats and got uncomfortable, and then just went ‘Yeah, yeah!’ Because we’re being told, well, you know the people that voted for Trump, they’re good people … they don’t mean what they say, we need to reach across the aisle.

“Just listening to people during intermission … I listened to people while they were having a drink, or a Coke, or a juju bean, or whatever — they were admitting they were being profoundly changed, and the play was only halfway over!” he added.

Watch above via YouTube.