‘The Apprentice’: How Donald Became Trump
A review of ‘The Apprentice’, by Ali Abbasi; Scythia Films, 2024.
The Apprentice is not quite an ‘origin’ story, dealing as it does with the ascent of Donald Trump from unworldly twenty-something to business titan. But still it attempts to explain how this callow if ambitious youth became more like the man we know, or think we know, today. And that explanation hangs on his encountering Roy Cohn, formerly the attack dog for Joseph McCartney, and the man who sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the chair. Roy Cohn, on the filmmaker’s view, taught Donald Trump everything he knows about winning.
At the film’s beginning, Donald (Sebastian Stan) is showing off to his date about his membership of an exclusive club. But what he does for a living is less glamorous. He goes from flat to flat in one of his father’s apartment blocks on Coney Island, demanding money. Some of the tenants beg for more time, others throw money in his face, others still try to douse him in boiling water. Some former and potential tenants have sued his father, Fred Trump, on the ground that he discriminates against African-Americans.
Then Donald meets Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). Cohn is intense, eccentric and brilliant. He likes Donald; he takes him under his wing. He frames him and his father as victims of an unjust attack by the federal government, agrees to take their discrimination case, and goes on the offensive. Donald likes Cohn back, finding him a better mentor than his own tyrannical father. Cohn, whose homosexuality is an open secret, teaches Donald how to dress and shares with him his own mad philosophy of life. Attack, attack, attack, he tells Donald; admit nothing, and always claim victory. The truth, Cohn says, is ‘a construct’. There is no right or wrong: there is only winning.
Cohn is intense, eccentric and brilliant. He likes Donald; he takes him under his wing.
Cohn helps Donald turn the derelict Commodore Hotel near Grand Central Terminal into a Hyatt. Through blackmail, he makes sure he gets a tax abatement, which upsets champions for the poor. Trump Tower, which Donald builds without his father’s permission, dwarfs Fred’s own achievements, and the media buys into the hype. While Cohn attacks unions, communists and welfare queens, his protegé’s profile grows. Donald, now Trump, becomes a symbol of Reagan-age success, telling the media that American needs to regain its old self-confidence and get stronger. He is now one of New York City’s most desirable bachelors, and promptly shacks up with Ivana (Maria Bakalova), a Czech model.
Familiar themes of cynicism and greed permeate this film. So too does the old idea of the corrupting power of money—of radix malorum est cupiditas, best expressed in Chaucher’s The Parson’s Tale. Donald, who begins at least partly as a sympathetic character, at once trying to escape his father’s shadow and carve out a place for himself, becomes more and more monstrous as the tale unfolds. Cohn shrinks into the background as he does so, which upsets him. Trump no longer needs him. It seems Cohn had not considered how his own belief system might justify such behaviour.
Trump, now president-elect, dismissed the film as ‘fake’ and ‘classless’ and its makers as ‘human scum’. Even at the best of times I think one has to separate fiction from the reality on which it is based; too many people already think, thanks to U-571, that the Americans, rather than Alan Turing and the team at Bletchley Park, cracked the enigma code. But The Apprentice is hardly a cross-examination of Trump: it is more a classic mentor-mentee sort of story in the style of the second Wall Street. It does not paint the former and future U.S. president in flattering colours, but it does not exactly damn him either, even as he does things that are deeply immoral.
The Apprentice is hardly a cross-examination of Trump: it is more a classic mentor-mentee sort of story in the style of the second Wall Street.
Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump, is brilliant, avoiding the trap (into which James Graham and the cast of Dear England so plainly fell) of putting impersonation above plot. Stan makes a believable Trump but not just because he has nailed the hand gestures and speech patterns. He is let down by the film’s editors, who fail to bridge the gap between the young and unworldly Donald and the self-confident Trump, so the way in which the man speaks and acts changes very suddenly between two scenes. Cohn, though less known, is also played brilliantly, which will not shock anyone who watched Succession and Jeremy Strong at work. Though most of the events of the film are a matter of historical record, I will not relate what happens towards the end of the film, when Strong shows what a good actor he is.
The film’s chief problem has to do with its plotting. Stories require high stakes and rising tension: at about the mid-way point of The Apprentice, much of both seems to dissipate, and so we are left to watch Trump continue on his trajectory without there being any real obstacles in his way. The first half of the film is excellent, however, and the ‘chemistry’ between Stan and Strong, Trump and Cohn, is the reason for it. Ivana, I am afraid, is a bit of a cardboard cut-out, with an accent so thick and unplaceable and vaguely Eastern European that one is reminded of a Bond villain. A sub-plot involving airline pilot Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick), Trump’s oldest and alcoholic brother, does not add much to the story.
Since I am interested in developmental psychology, that is, how one comes to become who one is, I would have liked to see more about Trump’s earliest years. But since I am equally interested in evolution, and how one applies one’s intelligence and industry to change oneself and one’s life, I was always going to like this film. As I have said above, it loses steam in the second half, and Cohn’s retreat from centre stage, though necessary, is a shame, but still: The Apprentice is a good film, with great cinematography by Michael Ballhaus, clever casting, outstanding acting, and a central story of historical interest. It will probably upset Trump’s biggest fans and most vociferous opponents.
