Donald Trump has lambasted ‘The Apprentice’ as "fake and classless".
The new film follows the controversial businessman (Sebastian Stan) in the 1970s as he rises from a New York real estate mogul to a figure synonymous with wealth and power under the tutelage of right-wing lawyer and political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), and now the former US president has fumed about the "defamatory" picture and said it's a "politically disgusting hatchet job" designed to sabotage his 2024 election campaign.
In a post on his Truth Social platform, he wrote: "A FAKE and CLASSLESS movie written about me, called, ‘The Apprentice’ (Do they even have the right to use that name without approval?), will hopefully ‘bomb’.
"It’s a cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country, 'MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!'"
Trump also hit out at writer Gabe Sherman for the flick's depiction of his late ex-wife Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova) as it contains a scene in which he appears to sexually assault her.
He continued: "My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died. The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but chose to ignore it.
"So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!"
Previously, Sebastian Stan had insisted he wanted to portray Trump as accurately and fairly as possible in the Ali Abbasi movie, though knew his performance as the businessman would be the subject of controversy anyway as a result of the former president's polarising political career.
Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, the ‘Thunderbolts*’ star said: "They think he’s either God’s son or he’s Lucifer incarnate, and I think we need to bring him back down to earth in the hope of understanding."