Is Gwen Stefani responsible for the Trump presidency? Michael Moore says maybe.

(Image credit: Matt Sayles/Invision/AP)

last updated 7 September 2018

She's more than just a girl — in fact, filmmaker Michael Moore has a theory that Gwen Stefani may be the person most responsible for getting President Trump into the White House.

Stefani wears a lot of hats — she's a solo pop star, No Doubt's frontwoman, a fashion designer, and a judge on The Voice. Her gig on the singing competition is why Moore believes Stefani launched the Trump presidency, he told The Hollywood Reporter. As Moore sees it, Trump likely learned NBC paid Stefani more to be a judge on The Voice than he received hosting The Apprentice, so he announced from Trump Tower he was running for president to show the network how famous he was and how much attention he could receive.

"He'd been talking about running for president since 1988, but he didn't really want to be president," Moore said. "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." Trump ended up getting dropped by NBC after saying Mexico was sending rapists to the United States, but Moore said by that time, he was too attached to the crowds coming to his rallies and the nonstop media coverage, and turned his joke candidacy into a real one. Read more about Moore's theory, and his new documentary Fahrenheit 11/9, at The Hollywood Reporter.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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