"The Apprentice" is the movie that Donald Trump does not want you to see, and it is easy to understand why. Despite taking creative liberties with the source material, historians tell Salon the new film that documents Trump's rise to political celebrity is accurate in its most important assertion: Trump was groomed for power by Roy Cohn, one of the most sinister lawyers in our nation's history.
The notion that legality and ethics are irrelevant and that the raw power wielded by society's status quo should alone determine who wins and loses has always been fundamental to far-right politics. Both in real life and in the film, Cohn summed up the most effective way to implement this philosophy with three rules for succeeding in politics, business and the law: (1) Attack, attack, attack, (2) Admit nothing, deny everything and (3) Always claim victory.
Born into a wealthy and politically well-connected New York family, Cohn took to the cause of anti-communism in the late 1940s, eventually winning a job over a young Robert F. Kennedy as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. McCarthy was a political celebrity in the early 1950s for his melodramatic, viciously personal and often baseless attacks against thousands of Americans. He insisted without proof that a communist conspiracy had infiltrated every level of the American political, media, academic and business communities, tapping into the more legitimate fears of communism sparked by America's Cold War with the Soviet Union. He was so influential that two presidents, Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower, quaked under fear of incurring McCarthy's wrath. McCarthy and his many followers went after marginalized communities from liberal idealists to impoverished union activists to Jews and homosexuals.
Those last two groups are notable because Cohn was himself both Jewish and gay, yet evinced an odd inability to see how the bigotries he cultivated against others like him reflected on himself. Cohn ruthlessly took charge of McCarthy's Senate work (McCarthy himself did little work besides orating as he struggled with a desperate alcohol addiction), earning great power in the process. Despite being later disgraced for abusing his position to help a friend (and possible lover), Cohn remained a prominent and politically influential attorney in New York City, a role he still had by the time he began to mentor Trump in 1973.
As "The Apprentice" accurately emphasizes, one cannot accurately comprehend the magnitude of the Cohn-Trump relationship without all of the aforementioned historical context. Although only indirectly acknowledged in the movie's narrative, it is nevertheless brought to the fore in the first scenes showing Cohn helping Trump beat back a federal investigation. As the heir to a real estate empire built by his developer dad, Fred Trump, we meet a young Donald (played by Sebastian Stan) as he is on the hook for an investigation into racial discrimination in his housing projects. Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong) argues for white supremacy as a cornerstone of the free enterprise system. It is the first of many political issues that Cohn and his acolytes (like Roger Stone) discuss with Trump, always from the vantage point of the far right: "Welfare queens," trade deficits, fighting Communists, avoiding business regulations
"Even though myself I'm not so sure that McCarthy and Cohn were fascistic, it's clear that what Trump learned from them eventually led to what I think is his 'wannabe fascism,'" Dr. Federico Finchelstein, chair of the history department at the New School for Social Research and author of "A Brief History of Fascist Lies," told Salon. "The idea that Trump is a fascist relates to his own kind of very basic, intuitive understanding of politics," which certainly puts him in contrast with ideologically well-read students of fascism like Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. "At the end of the day, it went back to a very kind of intuitive and really violent and narcissistic understanding of their own leadership." This intuition involves serving the interests of the powerful while pandering to the various hatreds of those among the powerless who can be easily manipulated. Inevitably, this type of thinking is hostile to widespread public education and effective democracies.
"Anti-democratic views were eventually part of the ferment for Trump's development as a kind of fascist situation, which of course ends in January 6," Finchelstein said, adding that he doubts Trump has any deeper "theoretical" underpinnings to his fascist beliefs beyond superficial support for the ideas already popular among his far right base. Like Cohn, Trump saw far right-wing politics first and foremost as an avenue to personal advancement. In this sense, Trump's refusal to accept the democratic system's verdict after losing the 2020 election was the most Cohn-like thing he could have done.
It also raises a simultaneously alluring and horrifying hypothetical scenario: What if Cohn, who was born in 1927, had not contracted AIDS and died in 1986? If he had lived to be 100 and therefore worked for Trump (who conceivably would have wanted Cohn's legal services, regardless of their later falling out), could Cohn have helped put Trump over the top and pull off his attempted coup to stay in power?
"I want to say he would be desirous of that, but I don't think he could have," says Christopher Elias, Assistant Professor of American Studies at Carleton College and author of "Gossip Men: J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and the Politics of Insinuation." Elias admitted that he felt this way more because of his bedrock faith in the soundness of American democracy, and acknowledged he was not entirely certain this was true. Unlike the comically inept and uninformed attorneys who aided Trump with his coup plot, Cohn was brilliant both in his knowledge of the law and his practical knowledge of where to exert painful pressure on weak points to gain power.
"He would've been right there with [former New York City Mayor Rudy] Giuliani and whoever else is pushing Trump to try to get [Vice President] Mike Pence to overturn the election," Elias said of Cohn. "That's a hundred percent going all the way through. Use every single legal or semi-legal or illegal advantage to your total advantage. And hell, now thanks to the Supreme Court, we know a bunch of it was 'legal,' even though it wasn't." Elias characterized Cohn as a man with more brains than the rest of Trump's legal team put together but concluded that he (Elias) has a "perhaps misplaced" faith in the durability of America's democratic institutions to withstand such assaults. Yet even Elias concedes that Cohn would have made things very dangerous for democracy's future. As an example of why, one need only look at his role in getting the death sentence for Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of playing a minor role in an espionage spy ring and whose death would leave her children orphaned (their father, Julius, had played a much larger role in the conspiracy). Both in the film and in real life, Cohn bragged about coercing Judge Irving Kaufman to sentence her to execution despite widespread outrage that the sentence was excessive.
"I don't know if it's true, but Cohn claims he did, and to some degree I believe him," Elias said. "He probably put his thumb on the scales as much as he could. He definitely had a backchannel to Kaufman." In addition to hating the Rosenbergs for being Communists, Elias speculated that he "probably [thought she] brings a bad name to certain Jews in Roy Cohen's eyes, this belief that she was in that kind of Brooklyn socialist gang." While Elias did not characterize this as Jewish self-hatred, it certainly bespoke an awkwardness that Cohn felt in his own skin as a Jew. Yet this was nothing compared to his self-hatred as a gay man; Cohn regularly insisted that he was so powerful that he could never be accurately classified as gay, but was simply a man who happened to sleep with other men. Unlike his discomfort with being a Jew, Cohn's disconnect over his identity as a gay man wound up taking a literally deadly turn for him after he was diagnosed as HIV positive. As "The Apprentice" accurately depicts, the diagnosis effectively ended the once-close friendship between Trump and Cohn. Trump even fumigated his property in Mar-a-Lago after Cohn visited for a birthday dinner shortly before his death. Ironically for Cohn, that bigotry toward LGBTQ people was another hallmark of the far-right worldview he taught Trump.
"These politics of xenophobia and of hatred of diversity, of people that are perceived by one fascist as different, that is a key element of fascism, perhaps the classic fascism," Finchelstein said. "The enemies were different, but the logic of enemy and the logic of demonization and dehumanization certainly is similar to previous fascist attempts." Cohn taught Trump that many in the public will support someone who is corrupt as long as they share the same hate for the same groups of people. Cohn eventually floundered because his status as a closeted gay man unsuccessfully hiding an AIDS diagnosis made him one of the targets instead of an asset. Soon after that he was dead, and Trump has never once publicly evidenced sadness at his loss. Nevertheless, as "The Apprentice" correctly shows, Cohn molded Trump into the man he is today throughout the 1970s and 1980s, with his fingerprints all over his protege decades later.
"Trump followed Cohn's rules to the letter: when you're guilty of something deny it, and turn the accusation against the accuser, even if they are innocent; and most of all, to always seek 'revenge,'" said Rick Perlstein, a historian and journalist. "It's a direct link to the days of Joseph McCarthy."
Perlstein added, "Like Trump, Roy Cohn delighted in flouting the law and getting away with it. My favorite example was his response when Roger Stone asked how he could win the endorsement for Ronald Reagan of New York's corrupt Liberal Party, which by 1980 was neither liberal nor a party, just the extension of the will of a corrupt man named Raymond Harding. Cohn told Stone to give him a suitcase stuffed with $100,000 in cash. The biggest lesson Cohn may have imparted to Trump, however, was not just how to succeed by being crooked, but that if you did it brazenly enough, you could be welcomed into the bosom of Manhattan society, like Cohn was." (The author, who previously interviewed Stone about his support for Trump and defense of McCarthyism, reached out to him for comment about the movie and did not receive a reply.)
If one equates social success with winning no matter the cost, then the most important skill a person can possess is the capacity to manipulate others. This was the force of attraction that drew Trump and Cohn to each other, with the latter mentoring the former on how to hone those aptitudes into a fine art.
"Trump sees in Cohn access to power in somebody who's willing to do anything to get ahead, and I think Cohn probably sees the exact same thing in Trump," Elias said. "Somebody who's willing to do anything to get ahead. And as Kamala Harris taught us at the debate a couple weeks ago, Donald Trump is very, very easily manipulated."
When Salon reached out to the Trump campaign with detailed questions about the disturbingly accurate history in "The Apprentice," the reply was a statement filled with dramatic denials and threatening counterattacks.
“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked," said communications director Steven Cheung. "As with the illegal Kamala witch-hunts, this is election interference by Hollywood elites right before November, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked. This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”
Elias is not surprised that Trump's team is doing this sort of thing. It's what Cohn taught Trump to do — and why, if nothing else, Elias suspects that if Cohn's soul is still aware of the larger world, it may be very happy with how things turned out with Trump.
As Elias said, "He is dancing in a shark-skin suit in his grave right now."
