It’s been months since the outspoken filmmaker left his building, but he’s kept busy podcasting, writing, producing—and rankling fellow lefties. Looking to November, Moore questions if Biden will still be running and worries Trump will throw a wrench in the works. Michael Moore, for decades on the political front lines, is hunkered down inside, riding out the pandemic from his Upper West Side apartment. “I literally have not stepped outside the door of my apartment building in 71 days,” he told me this week. He’s had one visitor in that time—a handyman—and sees his doorman from a distance when retrieving a package. Kind neighbors have dropped goodies outside his door. “I think they’re worried about me,” he says dryly. He fortunately has a balcony, a coveted feature for many sun-starved New Yorkers, and it’s there where he gets his daily exercise, walking back and forth in the small outdoor space until he’s logged a mile or two. “The people across the street,” he said with a laugh, “it must look like there’s a lunatic who lives across the street from them.” Last month, on his 45th day in isolation, Moore turned 66, and his age and past bout with pneumonia make him a prime candidate to get hit hard by the virus. After spending much of the fall and winter stumping through Iowa and New Hampshire on behalf of Bernie Sanders, Moore opted not to travel ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries being held in early March, wary of a coronavirus crisis that was only just coming into focus in the United States. Moore recalled getting scared straight after talking to experts and academics and seeing “a runaway train heading in our direction.” To Moore’s friends it seemed like uncharacteristic alarmism. At that point in February, there had yet to be a death from COVID-19 reported in the U.S.; “social distancing” was still weeks away from entering the lexicon. “Everybody was like, ‘Dude, this doesn’t sound like you,’” Moore said. “I said, ‘No, I know, but I’m just using my own instinct here. I’m not a scientist.’” What Moore had to figure out then was where to quarantine. A doctor recommended Michigan, where the Flint native has a home, cautioning that New York’s hospital system could be overwhelmed. But Moore had visions of the virus bringing about chaos and unrest, even angry mobs, a scene straight out of The Day of the Locust. He concluded that “it would be actually more dangerous to be in the place where people are carrying a lot of guns.” “This was all before we watched all the people I went to high school with show up at the state capitol with their guns,” he said, referring to the anti-lockdown protests in Michigan that have drawn some rifle-toting demonstrators and President Donald Trump egging them on with a call to “liberate” the state.