The Apprentice, which chronicles the period from the mid ’70s to the late ’80s, where Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) first rises to prominence in New York real estate under the tutelage of red-baiting lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), has been described as a “pure fiction” and “election interference” by Trump’s team. Director Ali Abbasi has offered to screen it for the former president, arguing “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike”. That seems a stretch.
Stan wisely steers clear of caricature in his portrayal — his Trump, when he first meets Cohn, is nervous, diffident, almost vulnerable. When he is asked to join Cohn’s table — filled out with some of the mobsters Cohn represents — he’s slightly hunched and quiet, not yet prone to simply freestyling about his achievements when he’s unsure what to say.
At the time of their meeting, Trump is being sued for racial discrimination for his method of allocation of apartments as part of his father’s real estate business. Cohn takes on the case, and takes on Donald as a project. Aggressively counter suing, berating the government officials investigating Trump, gleefully profane, Cohn teaches young Donald his rules for success: One: “Attack, attack, attack”. Two: “Admit nothing, deny everything”. Three: “Always claim victory, never admit defeat”. It’s Trump, and eventually a decade of world politics, made in three dot points.
Parallel to this is Trump’s courtship of Czech model Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Bakalova) — in whose drive and ambition he sees a mirror, one he inevitably begins to loathe once his initial, relentless courtship of her proves successful.
Jeremy Strong is remarkable as Cohn, replicating his eerily still face, his features receding as though they were weak spots to be hidden.
The Apprentice is at its best early on, when it captures Trump’s pupation with a queasy inevitability; somewhere at the intersection of the ersatz sophistication, cheap glitz and mechanical eroticism of the Euro-disco that pervades the soundtrack and the seething decay of 1970s New York, he emerges, a quick study, able to match his ambition to fleet-footed opportunism. Trump, that most mediated and uncanny of political figures, is seen over the course of the film through various era-appropriate film stocks — from New Hollywood grain to the soft edges of VHS.
As Trump gets stronger, Cohn gets weaker, almost as though Trump has vampirically leeched away Cohn’s essence. When rumours swirl that Cohn has contracted AIDS, Trump dumps the closest thing to a friend he’s ever had. Bringing him back into the fold only when he needs help, towards the end of the film, Trump wheels the dying man around Mar-a-Lago, showing him Polaroids of his latest conquest and following a self-involved and insulting toast to Cohn by serving him an American flag cake. Cohn, seeming to gain a soul as he loses the world, bursts into tears at what he’s created.
Trump in The Apprentice is depicted as a man near incapable of sincere pleasures or genuine human connection. There is no-one close to him he cannot tire of and abandon. He attends Cohn’s bacchanalian parties to network, not to party. His prodigious amphetamine consumption is so he can work more. The only drink he indulges in is diet coke. He’s frequently rendered impotent by pills and stress, and if he takes any pleasure in sex beyond bragging about it, we don’t see it.
Which brings us to the scene where Trump rapes Ivana. That so few reviews mention it points to the breathtakingly casual way it is used in the film. It happens during a fight that follows Trump’s confession that he no longer feels any attraction to his wife. Then the plot continues, the act nothing more than evidence of Trump’s growing estrangement from any humanity he once had.
This may be intended as a commentary on the conspiracy of silence around rape; the way multiple accusations of assault — and his own braying about it — cost Trump (and Bill Clinton, while we’re on the subject) nothing in his journey to America’s top office. If that’s the case, I would argue there are better ways to illustrate this than to depict a recanted accusation from a woman who, now deceased, cannot respond with her truth.
This is one of two major liberties the film takes, the other being that Cohn secures a favourable outcome for Trump by blackmailing a Department of Justice figure with compromising photos of him with “cabana boys”. Its amorality, ruthlessness and hypocrisy — Trump at one point accidentally walks in on one of Cohn’s gay orgies — initially shocks Trump. At the end of the film he regurgitates Cohn’s three rules to a biographer as though they were his own.
What the film fails to do is to truly communicate the journey from the first Trump to the second — things happen, time passes, period-appropriate pop music plays, and the next time we see Trump, he’s that bit more recognisable as the rambling, decaying figure who posts about elite weather conspiracies aimed at undermining his third (serious) presidential bid.
So by the time we leave Trump, bullshitting his ghostwriter, staring ravenously out of his office window at the New York skyline, there’s that red tie, the funneling mouth and, above all else, the void.
