Michael Moore has made the startling claim that Gwen Stefani was the reason Donald Trump ran for the presidency.
The Fahrenheit 11/9 alleged in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter on Wednesday that Trump, 72, decided to announce his candidacy for president after he learned Stefani, 48, made more money as a coach on NBC’s The Voice than he did when he starred on The Apprentice.
Moore, 64, claimed Trump organized his infamous Trump Tower campaign announcementas a way to show NBC he was more popular. NBC began airing The Apprentice in 2004.
“He’d been talking about running for president since 1998, but he didn’t really want to be president,” Moore told THR. “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.”
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
Despite Trump’s attempt to one-up the network, NBC cut ties with the business mogul following his comments about Mexican nationals.
A rep for Stefani did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
The filmmaker’s claims come on the same day an anonymous author claiming to be a senior Trump administration official asserted that there’s a resistance movement against Trump from within his own White House.
In the essay, titled “I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration,” the author claims that many senior White House officials are secretly working to “thwart” the president’s “misguided impulses” and “worst inclinations” until he is out of office.
The author blasted Trump’s “amorality” and “anti-democratic” impulses, and accused the president of attacking conservative ideals including “free minds, free markets and free people.”
“Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back,” the author wrote.
The president addressed the op-ed at an event in the East Room on Wednesday, saying, “He’s part of the resistance within the Trump administration. This is what we have to deal with. And, you know, the dishonest media — because you people deal with it as well as I do — but it’s really a disgrace.”
“When you tell me about some anonymous source within the administration, probably who’s failing and probably here for all the wrong reasons — no,” Trump continued. “And The New York Times is failing. If I weren’t here, I believe The New York Times probably wouldn’t even exist. And someday when I’m not president, which hopefully will be in about six and a half years from now, The New York Times and CNN and all these phony media outlets will be out of business, folks. They’ll be out of business because there will be nothing to write and nothing of interest.”
In a note attached to the op-ed, the Times said that it knew the author’s identity but agreed to publish the essay anonymously so as not to jeopardize the official’s job.
Fahrenheit 11/9 is in theaters Sept. 21.
