‘Election interference by Hollywood elites’: Donald Trump’s war on The Apprentice
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In February this year, Dan Snyder, the billionaire American businessman who has recently diversified from owning football teams into film production, sat down to watch a private screening of a picture. This particular film, entitled The Apprentice, was one that that he had invested millions in, via his company Kinematics. Snyder was only too happy to open his cheque book in the belief that the film that he was funding was a flattering portrait of his friend Donald Trump, and dutifully co-funded Ali Abbasi’s biographical drama alongside a range of investors that included the Canadian government.
A more astute financier may have realised that this unusual choice of co-funders meant that the finished project was not necessarily going to be the puff piece that he may have been expecting. Yet when the screening finished, according to a report in Variety, Snyder’s hopes that – in this most crucial of election years – the picture that he had poured a vast amount of his money into would be laudatory towards the prospective president were well and truly dashed. In his towering fury, he wanted nothing more than to burn the negative. And then, it’s alleged, the legal letters and talk of “cease and desist” – even scrapping the film altogether – began.
Snyder, who is yet to respond to Variety’s report, was unsuccessful, not least because the production company distanced themselves from him. “All creative and business decisions involving The Apprentice have always been and continue to be solely made by Kinematics,” read a statement.
Three months later, The Apprentice has received a high-profile premiere at this year’s Cannes film festival. This year’s event has not been short of headline-grabbing spectacle (Coppola! Costner! Demi Moore’s grand comeback!), but, for sheer controversy, nothing has come close to the much-discussed account of the relationship between Donald Trump and his mentor and lawyer Roy Cohn, the man who taught him how to become the behemoth in political and public culture that he has become.
The film, according to the news agency AFP, “paints an unflinching but nuanced portrait of the former US president”. It contains, as the news agency said – perhaps with implicit horror – “rape, erectile dysfunction, baldness and betrayal”. And this doesn’t even cover the half of it, either. There are moments in which Trump (still a man in his twenties and thirties, in the time period covered in the film) is depicted having both liposuction and a hair transplant. The scenes of the latter are said to be especially gruesome.
The beleaguered presidential candidate, himself currently sweating it out in a New York courtroom, has already fired back, via his campaign team. His communications director Steven Cheung announced that the Left-wing filmmakers clearly had a political agenda in mind, in this of all years, as well as threatening that there would be a lawsuit to address “the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers.”
The statement went on: “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked. This is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”
Whatever the film’s artistic merits (reviews have been mixed), there is no doubt that The Apprentice has spectacularly rattled cages in a way that political cinema so rarely does. Certainly, there have been few films about American presidents that have gone for the jugular in such a visceral fashion. Leaving aside Mike Nichols’s toothless Primary Colours, with John Travolta as a barely disguised Clinton, and Oliver Stone’s ambitious but unsuccessful George W Bush biopic W., there have been few truly successful attempts at delving into the lives and psyches of the inhabitants of the Oval Office.
Even Stone’s Nixon – perhaps the last truly warts ‘n’ all portrayal of a credibly flawed man – was criticised in some corners for pulling its punches. Yet now, Abbasi’s take-no-prisoners film has finally taken politics into contemporary cinema, and the uproar that it is whipping up suggests that he has done his job admirably.
From the smirking irony of the title onwards – the allusion to Trump’s successful television series is entirely intentional, although this part of the future president’s life is not depicted in the film – The Apprentice is a largely unflattering account of the early years of the future president. It focuses on the rise to prominence of the young Trump, as played by Captain America and I, Tonya star Sebastian Stan. The actor’s last high-profile role was as the narcissistic sex addict Tommy Lee in the biographical series Pam & Tommy; comparisons between the priapic politician and the preening musician are irresistible.
His bullying father Fred, who would send the young Donald from door to door to collect debts owed to the family business, is portrayed by Christopher Nolan regular Martin Donovan, and Trump’s first wife Ivana is played by Bulgarian actress Maria Bakalova, best known for her role playing Borat’s daughter. She is also a regular of such films as Transgression and Women Do Cry, which undoubtedly prepared her for such a demanding and, if the early reports are to be believed, emotionally exhausting role.
Yet, for many viewers, the most interesting piece of casting will be that of the great Jeremy Strong, fresh from his award-winning role in Succession. Strong takes on the role of Roy Cohn, a monstrous figure who instilled in Trump the mantras that he has lived by ever since; his advice could be summed up as “attack, counterattack and never apologise”. The real-life relationship between the two is fascinating.
Cohn took Trump under his wing, believing that he could mould the brash but oddly shy young arriviste into something that he could make use of, and initially the ambitious property developer thrived on the relationship with his mentor before eventually betraying him as Cohn lay dying of Aids. (In the film, Cohn laughs of the attendees to his lavish parties that “If you’re indicted, you’re invited.”) It is rich, Shakespearean material, and it is all too easy to imagine Strong – who, after all, gave us a warped version of Hamlet in Succession – tearing into the Iago-esque malice for everything he is worth.
Cohn has been played on screen before by the likes of Al Pacino and James Woods, and was immortalised on stage in the play Angels in America, which portrays him as a Mephistophelean figure, spitting out homophobic abuse and refusing to admit his own homosexuality. (Cohn was even the model for The Simpsons’ Mr Burns.) There is little doubt, however, that his formative role in Trump’s life is one that has been underplayed in the public consciousness.
There have already been accusations of fabrication and politically dictated propaganda. In one of the most controversial scenes in the film, Trump is shown having violent sex with Ivana which may, or may not, be rape, according to one’s perspective. Although the film begins with a disclaimer that many of the events within it are fictionalised, this scene remains hugely controversial because of the differing accounts that Ivana gave of its inspiration during her lifetime.
“On one occasion during 1989, Mr Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently towards me than he had during our marriage,” she said in 1993. “As a woman I felt violated … I referred to this as a rape, but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
During their divorce proceedings, Trump dismissed this as “obviously false”, but in 2015, while her ex-husband was running for the presidency, Ivana clearly felt that she had to clarify matters, declaring in a statement: “I have recently read some comments attributed to me from nearly 30 years ago at a time of very high tension during my divorce from Donald. The story is totally without merit. Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised 3 children that we love and are very proud of.”
Those involved in the film have described the sex scene as “rough but consensual”; Ivana died in 2022 so is not around to comment on either the film or her presentation in it.
During a press conference at Cannes, Abbasi, who had earlier called his film as “a punk rock version of a historical movie” in which he was attempting “[not to] get too anal about details and what’s right and what’s wrong” expressed possibly disingenuous surprise at the Trump camp’s reaction to the film. (Interestingly, some Left-wing critics have criticised the picture for being too generous towards him, noting that there are moments in which he is described as handsome and bearing a marked resemblance to the actor Robert Redford.)
Abbasi offered to meet with Trump to discuss the picture, saying “I don’t necessarily think this is a movie he would dislike, I don’t think he’d necessarily like it, but I think he would be surprised.” Describing himself and his cast as “completely non-partisan” – tongue heavily in cheek – he read out a statement from the absent Strong about how “we’re experiencing Roy Cohn’s long dark shadow” and that it was appropriate he was currently starring in a Broadway play called Enemy of the People.
Yet rather than The Apprentice being a point-scoring exercise in sensation, Abbasi has suggested that his intention was to make a film about the corrupting influence of power, and how Cohn passed on his poison to another generation. Nonetheless, he could not resist the most topical of digs; when asked when he’d like to see his film – which currently has no US distributor – released, he replied “We have this promotional event, the U.S. election, with us and the movie, so we’re hoping to very much to come out [then].”
He also remains relaxed about the possibility of legal action from Trump. “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people,” the director has quipped. “They don’t talk about his success rate, though.”
