Is there anything surprising left about former President Donald Trump? Ali Abassi, a filmmaker, would say yes. In his latest film, “The Apprentice,” Abassi rakes the muck that is the rotten underbelly of Trump’s formative New York years under the guidance of Roy Cohn, a malignant tumor of a lawyer who lays out three Machiavellian rules to a young and malleable Trump: “Attack, attack, attack,” “admit nothing, deny everything” and “no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.”
The film centers on a not-oft dramatized period of Trump’s life. Fresh out of Wharton, University of Pennsylvania’s business school, Trump seeks to carve his name in the Big Apple and try to differentiate himself from a stolid father who established the family name. Whether dining amongst magnates and moguls, jockeying control of the derelict Commodore Hotel or beating back racial discrimination charges by the Department of Justice and the NAACP, he (wrongly, in hindsight) assumes that he would have nothing to lose in courting the mentorship of New York City sleazebag number one, Roy Cohn.
From Roy Cohn’s first scene — across the bar, with a camera slowly zooming as he locks eyes with Trump — his personality underscores Trump’s moral deterioration. Cohn — played to perfection, idiosyncrasy after idiosyncrasy, by Jeremy Strong — is slippery and elusive, clever and acute, with a penchant for witty remarks, tanning beds, boisterous parties and blackmail. Cohn’s is a life defined by self-negation — perfectly framed to inculcate within Trump a willful incognizance of the value of truth and justice.
In an interview with The New York Times, Strong described the intentions of the film and said, “We’re trying to hold a mirror up to this world and these individuals and try to understand how we got here.” Understanding these intentions is easiest when looking at the roles Strong has taken in recent years. Starting with “Succession,” where he plays Kendall Roy, the grief-stricken black sheep of the Roy family, a media dynasty whose source material draws from the Trumps, the Murdochs and the Redstones, who navigates corporate rot in modern America while constantly failing at the impossible task of filling his father’s shoes. In “Armageddon Time,” James Gray’s largely autobiographical film about Jewish identity in America, Strong plays a plumber in Queens who sends his son to a preparatory school in New York where the Trump family names looms in the background (Maryanne Trump visits the school to give speeches and Fred Trump helps fund the school).
Strong came back to Broadway this past year with a revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “An Enemy of the People,” where he plays Thomas Stockman, a divisive doctor who parallels Strong’s own complete conviction of artistic pursuit. He goes against the politicians and warns his town that they must close their resort baths — even if it means economic loss for a growing city — because the water has been contaminated. And “The Apprentice” seems to complete the trail that Strong has been blazing.
The Trump we know today is a product of Cohn. Though his actions from the 1980s seem trivial compared to his wrongdoings in recent years, the pangs of a never-satiated hunger to game the system, which Cohn nurtured in a young Trump, remain tangible in the minds of contemporary viewers and voters alike. Trump in the film (played ambitiously by Sebastian Stan, who, in preparation, had a folder on his phone of “a hundred and thirty videos of Trump, which capture his tiniest gestures and his over-all mien,”) is misogynistic, anti-exercise, pro-diet pill and a habitual liar and stabs Cohn in the back in the end. At Cohn’s birthday he gifts the lawyer, who is in a wheelchair and slowly withering from mysterious AIDS-like symptoms, a pair of fake Tiffany diamond cufflinks.
Nothing is more telling about this film than its turbulent struggle toward a release in America. Since its first screenings this year, competing for the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Trump and his legal team have threatened lawsuits against its distribution. Eventually though, the film secured a widespread theatrical run this past month. In an election cycle burdened by the gravity of a second Trump term, one can only hope “The Apprentice” might provide Trump a moment of genuine self-reflection.
