The Apprentice controversy: Donald Trump and the ‘toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest’ lawyer in the US

This week US television networks took the unusual step of turning down ads for a movie, when distributors tried to book spots during the vice-presidential debate between JD Vance and Tim Walz on Tuesday night. The ads were for The Apprentice, the Donald Trump origin story written by the journalist Gabriel Sherman and directed by the Iranian film-maker Ali Abbasi.
The Apprentice has had a rocky path to release since it premiered five months ago at Cannes, where The Irish Times gave it a three-star review. Normally there wouldn’t be anything remarkable about a gap of that length. But this particular film has a clock ticking, and US election day is now only four weeks away. “Watching how The Apprentice plays in the United States’ polarised political landscape will be intriguing,” Tara Brady wrote at the time. We very nearly didn’t find out.
After the Cannes screening the Trump campaign, as is its wont, threatened legal action, which unsurprisingly failed to materialise. But there seemed to be little appetite among streamers and distributors for The Apprentice, whose most controversial sequence depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana (who alleged rape in her 1990 divorce deposition but later retracted her claim, following an agreement and settlement).
Variety reports, rather hilariously, that Trump’s billionaire pal Dan Snyder put money into The Apprentice via the film’s production company Kinematics because “he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president”. It looked as if the film might be locked away as a result until Kinematics sold its stake in the film, in late August, and a distribution deal was secured.
The Apprentice is not a flattering portrayal. Set in the New York of the 1970s and 1980s, it stars Sebastian Stan as young Donald, working as a rent collector for his Queens landlord dad but intent on making it as a big-time Manhattan developer. Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn, the legendarily reptilian redbaiter, closeted homophobe, fixer for the Mob and legal attack dog for the highest bidder. Cohn, who died of Aids complications in 1986, occupies a unique niche in the rogues’ gallery of modern US history. He’s the connective tissue that joins Joe McCarthy’s House Un-American activities committee witch hunt of the early 1950s to the Maga movement of today.
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Look at the footage of Trump shouting “fight, fight, fight” after surviving an assassination attempt in July and you’re watching Cohn’s handiwork. “He fights his cases as if they were his own,” Ken Auletta wrote in an Esquire profile in 1978. “It is war. If he feels his adversary has been unfair, it is war to the death. No white flags. No Mr Nice Guy. Prospective clients who want to kill their husband, torture a business partner, break the government’s legs, hire Roy Cohn. He is a legal executioner – the toughest, meanest, loyalest, vilest, and one of the most brilliant lawyers in America.”
It’s not Cohn’s first appearance in a drama: he’s a key figure in Tony Kushner’s Aids epic Angels in America (Al Pacino took the role in Mike Nichols’s screen version); James Woods (a Trump supporter these days) played him in the 1992 biopic Citizen Cohn. Versions of Cohn crop up in episodes of The X-Files and The Good Fight. He’s even name-checked in the Billy Joel song We Didn’t Start the Fire.
Having learned everything he could from his mentor, Trump famously dumped Cohn as soon as the lawyer’s powers began to wane because of his failing health and legal difficulties. “Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn said before his death.
The film opens in the US next Friday and the following week in Irealand, but it’s unlikely to have much impact on the political landscape, and it’s hard to disagree with Entertainment Weekly’s verdict that “the most disturbing aspect of The Apprentice is how familiar this all is by now and how numb we are to its depravity”.
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That hasn’t stopped the Trump campaign from responding in familiar fashion. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked,” its communications director, Steven Cheung, told Deadline.
“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.”
Roy Cohn would have approved.