For a while, it seemed like American moviegoers might not get to see The Apprentice. The film, which was directed by Ali Abbasi and written by former New York Magazine writer Gabriel Sherman, depicts Donald Trump’s fraught relationship with mentor Roy Cohn and his eventual rise as an infamous New York City developer. It reportedly struggled to find a U.S. distributor after its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May, leading some to worry that political repression could block the film’s release. Trump himself sent a cease-and-desist letter to filmmakers, and spokesperson Steven Cheung called the film “pure garbage†and “election interference†in statements to several outlets. But Trump is prone to making empty legal threats, and a lawsuit never materialized (though a $400,000 Kickstarter campaign aimed at raising funds to defend the film did). The Apprentice released in theaters on October 11.
Trump apparently concluded that he has nothing to fear from the film. Is he right? Yes, mostly. Filmmakers set themselves a difficult task when they chose Trump, an overexposed man with infamous onscreen appeal, as their subject. The former president has been a fixture of my professional life for as long as I’ve been a political journalist. He dominates news cycle after cycle as journalists endlessly pick apart his biography, or assess his psychology, for some new key to understanding this person. I’m not convinced such a key exists, but if it does, The Apprentice hasn’t discovered it.
The film does little to develop Trump in a novel manner, perhaps because there isn’t much new material to excavate. We begin in the early ’70s, a humiliating but formative period for the former president. He’s collecting rent for his despicable father, Fred, who’s facing a federal lawsuit over his racially discriminatory housing practices. Trump is desperate to defeat the suit, not due to any particular loyalty to his father but rather ambition. He needs Fred’s approval for a risky development in Manhattan, and Fred won’t give it. Enter a stroke of dubious luck. Trump becomes a member of a nightclub to which the right-wing attorney Roy Cohn also belongs, and when Cohn takes an interest in the young Trump, the aspiring mogul sees an opportunity. He begs Cohn to represent him and his father, and Cohn agrees, partly out of a genuine antipathy for the civil-rights movement.
It’s the beginning of a partnership that would propel the already-wealthy Trump into the highest echelons of New York City society. Trump’s relationship with Cohn is arguably one of the most important in his life; in the film, there’s no Trump as we know him today without Cohn’s influence. Sebastian Stan plays an awkward Trump figure, at least in his early years, but there are flashes of coldness and brutality that make him a natural protégé for Cohn, who is played with vampiric intensity by Jeremy Strong. Cohn, a vicious anti-communist and former McCarthy henchman, sees Trump as a lump of raw clay that he can easily mold. But Trump isn’t quite so naïve. He’s using Cohn, just as Cohn is using him, and while Trump may be shocked by Cohn’s closeted homosexuality, he’s less dismayed by the attorney’s dirty tactics and reactionary politics. Cohn makes the federal lawsuit disappear, which is all Trump really wants. (In The Apprentice, Cohn blackmails a federal prosecutor with photos of a gay tryst; later, the government offers the Trumps a settlement that does not require them to admit guilt.)
The first half of the film is not entirely without its subversive qualities, as the gullibility of the media industry and the fawning coverage Trump often received figure in the film’s portrayal of his early rise. The media provided Trump and, by extension, Cohn with marks they could easily manipulate. Although the film’s narrative ends well before Trump’s reality-television career began, it’s possible to see the machine in motion. If Hollywood got cold feet about The Apprentice, maybe its complicity helps explain why; Trump is a product of the entertainment world as much as he is family money and unrepentant bigotry. We aren’t quite used to seeing Trump as anyone’s student, either. Our would-be strongman prefers to be seen as the ultimate alpha male: a product of good genes, not tutelage. But Strong as Cohn is compelling to watch, even to people who knew Trump’s old friend well. Roger Stone, who Cohn introduced to Trump and who is played by Mark Rendall in the film, tweeted that Strong’s performance was “uncanny in it’s accuracy.†(I guess he’d know.) Strong also delivers one of the film’s most chilling moments as Cohn defends his role in putting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to death for alleged Soviet espionage. He wanted so badly to see the “pinko kikes fry†for their purported sins, he tells Trump; of Ethel, he adds, “She betrayed her country and she had to die.â€
Trump is an eager student and as he masters Cohn’s lessons, the relationship between Cohn and himself gradually fades from view, and the film begins to falter when it broaches familiar territory and Trump takes up more of the screen. The Apprentice is at its strongest when Cohn is in focus, thanks not only to Strong’s performance but to Cohn’s extremist views and vicious tendencies, which he helped inculcate in Trump. Though Cohn’s mentorship of Trump isn’t news, he has arguably been overshadowed by the success of his onetime protégé, and their partnership isn’t as well-known as it likely should be. The film is not a documentary; even so, it may help put the record straight. As the late investigative reporter Wayne Barrett once told Washington Post reporters Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher, “I just look at him and see Roy,†adding, “Both of them are attack dogs.â€
In the second half of the film, Trump’s monstrous tendencies grow after being honed first under his father, then under Cohn, and he becomes the Trump we know well. He is greedy, rapacious in a literal sense as he assaults his wife, Ivana, in a lengthy and violent scene. He shows little political ambition at first; it’s Cohn, not Trump, who possesses some underlying ideology, warped though it is. Stone, though, urges Trump to support Ronald Reagan, who “stands for all the things you care about,†and introduces Trump to the Reagan slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again.†Trump slips the campaign button into his desk, and the words linger.
By the time Cohn reappears, ill with AIDS, Trump has moved on from his master and the film has run out of things to say. Toward the end of Cohn’s life, Trump distanced himself from his former mentor and, in a moment the film dramatizes, he gives the dying man a large pair of “diamondâ€cuff links that turn out to be knockoffs. Trump, the film argues, has rewritten history by dismissing Cohn’s influence on him. Trump told the Post in 2016 that his tactics are his own, saying, “I don’t think I got that from Roy at all. I think I’ve had a natural instinct for that.â€
When Strong’s Cohn tells the future president that he made him who he is, Trump replies that he made himself. Neither man is entirely wrong, but if that’s all the revelation the film has to offer, it’s not much. As successful as its depiction of Cohn may be, it leaves us with a Trump who’s more of a cartoon than a legible — if horrifying — person. The resulting Trump is so familiar that even his most dastardly behaviors feel a bit flat, and the film begins to bore. We didn’t need a movie to tell us that Trump has been accused of rape, and not just by ex-wife Ivana, who now lies buried on his Bedminster golf course. We know that Trump is racist. We know his greed, his lies, his authoritarianism — and it’s all fake news to half the country. Trump hasn’t won re-election, but the race is so tight that he very well could. As far as MAGA is concerned, The Apprentice will slide off Trump the way E. Jean Carroll’s story did, the way the Access Hollywood tape did, the way everything still does. Trump didn’t fear The Apprentice because he knew it didn’t matter. That’s the filmmakers’ problem, but it’s ours too.
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