Trump Origin Story Flick ‘The Apprentice’ & Cannes Take Over ElectionLine Podcast; UK PM’s Wet July 4 Vote Launch, GOP’s FBI Assassination Conspiracies

Dominic Patten and Ted Johnson
·3 min read
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Editors note: Running until the final general election results come in, the Deadline ElectionLine podcast spotlights the 2024 campaign and the blurred lines between politics and entertainment in modern America. Hosted by Deadline’s political editor Ted Johnson and executive editor Dominic Patten, the podcast features commentary and interviews with top lawmakers and entertainment figures. At the same time, you can follow all the news in the Biden & Trump rematch and more on the ElectionLine hub on Deadline.

“What surprised me is how good it is,” says Deadline’s Anthony D’Alessandro of the Cannes-debuting Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice. “You know, there are some people that have tried to ding it and say, ‘Oh, it’s an HBO movie,’” Deadline’s editorial director states from the South of France on today’s ElectionLine podcast. “But let me say this: it’s a very good HBO movie.”

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“I just think it’s very well crafted. It has its own voice. What’s interesting is that for a biopic such as this, it gets a lot in there about his life and about the relationship with Roy Cohn,” D’Alessandro added – as you can hear above.

The Apprentice movie with Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan
(L-R) Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in ‘The Apprentice’

Starring Sebastian  Stan as Trump in the 70s and 1980s, Succession vet Jeremy Strong as the infamous and ruthless lawyer Cohn and Borat alum Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump, the Ali Abbasi directed flick got an 11-minute standing ovation at Cannes earlier this week. Featuring a long alleged sexual assault of Ivana by Trump and other alleged misconduct, The Apprentice also got the threat of a lawsuit from the Trump campaign – a threat that Abbasi laughed off.

D’Alessandro thinks that once the film is released in the U.S. later this year, it will surprise both the MAGA crowd and the Never Trump crowd.

“It’s not in its entirety an anti-Donald Trump movie. It’s truly about this man’s origins …and what he had to do to become a real estate tycoon.”

We’ll see and we’ll see what effect The Apprentice could have on what looks to be a tight election.

Also on today’s Deadline ElectionLine podcast: Joe Biden tried to kill Donald Trump, the MAGA crowd insist.

A standard FBI form on the use of force as it conducted a search of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022 for top secret documents has morphed into a conspiracy theory that the current POTUS orchestrated an effort to take out his rival, the past  and perhaps future POTUS.  It’s spread across social media, fueled by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Donald Trump, as well as Fox host Maria Bartiromo.

Rishi Sunak outside 10 Downing Street
Rishi Sunak outside 10 Downing Street

Literally everything went wrong this week with British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s call for elections on July 4. Delay, ignorant MPs, pouring rain and punking from protesters with a throwback song from Tony Blair’s 1997 landslide almost drowned out the Conservative leader.

“You just had this slightly farcical half an hour or something where the rain is coming down and nobody knows when the announcement that everyone knows what’s coming, is going to come,” says Deadline’s International TV co-Editor Max Goldbart of Sunak’s May 22 announcement.

“In the end, I think that just came a point when they were like Go for it. Rishi go outside,” Goldbart adds on the podcast today from the UK. “Why no one had an umbrella was incredible. And it really was …if you’ve been following British politics, since Rishi Sunak took over about a year and a half ago it’s been sort of one disaster after another for the Conservatives.”

Way behind the Labor Party in the polls, Sunak’s snap election signaled confidence in Tory prospects following some better-than-expected economic news. But the media narrative is still that Britons are ready for change after years of conservative rule.

Or as International Investigations Editor Jake Kantor noted: “Things could only get wetter.”

If the past few years of UK politics and media are any indication, it will get much wetter.

Stay with ElectionLine all the way to Election Day: Subscribe to the Deadline ElectionLine podcast on Spotify, Apple Music, iHeart, and all podcast platforms

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