Donald Trump was pitiful before he was a predator
Film | Jorge Ignacio Castillo
The Apprentice
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UPDATE: FRIDAY NOV. 8 2024: A majority of American voters elected Donald Trump president of the United States on Tuesday, Nov. 5, 2024.
In the beginning, Trump was just lost.
Every villain has an origin story and Donald Trump is no different. Yes, he’s the embodiment of hubris, a catalyst for white supremacy and a danger to America and the world, but Trump wasn’t always this repulsive. As a young man, he was more your garden-variety, overprivileged, and entitled and self-centred prick. Why, he was practically a puppy! A puppy that barked, bit and pissed the floor, sure. But still.
Then Roy Cohn took Trump under his wing and purged all remaining humanity, and behold! The shambling orange fascist we know and love today.
That’s the premise of The Apprentice, director Ali Abbasi’s first film in English. Abbasi’s previous movies — Border and Holy Spider — showed his talent for deep digging into broad subjects like bigotry and religious zealotry, and shedding light on their less obvious consequences. The Apprentice, a film more understated than this review’s opening suggests, looks past the monster and rather focuses on the endurance of hateful ideas and how they reproduce.
We first encounter DJT (Sebastian Stan, the MCU’s Bucky Barnes) as an errand boy for his father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan, Tenet). Their real estate business is on the verge of collapse following accusations of discrimination against black would-be renters (shocking!). Fearing for his inheritance, Donald hires infamous attorney Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, Succession) to get them out of trouble.
Cohn, who seems committed to being on the wrong side of history, soon becomes Trump’s consiglieri. He’s the one who teaches Donald the three rules of success (“success”): attack constantly, admit nothing/deny everything, and NEVER admit defeat. Sound familiar? The fact we’ve seen all three at work throughout Trump’s political career (most notably, his January 6, 2021 coup attempt) proves the infamous attorney’s impact on the once-impressionable young businessman.
Eventually, Cohn finds himself at the receiving end of Donald’s duplicitous nature and, like many others after him, discovers Trump is loyal to one person only: DJT.
In one of the most striking scenes, Trump rejects his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm) as she tries to console him over the death of his brother, Fred Jr. He’s clearly distraught, but demonstrating weakness, even in an intimate setting, is unacceptable.
Most Trump impersonations treat the former U.S. President as a cartoonish, comical figure. An increasingly interesting actor, Sebastian Stan taps into a darker undercurrent: Trump’s viciousness. There are ‘Trumpisms’ in his performance but Stan never verges into the parody. To his credit, he humanizes the monster up to the point there’s no humanity left.
As usual, Jeremy Strong is superb as Roy Cohn. Like Stan, Strong avoids the caricature and adds a layer of pathos: this is a man who’s always performing. Cohn cultivates an intense, win-at-any-cost persona while living as a closeted gay man. As suggested in The Apprentice, he reaches a breaking point during the AIDS crisis when his compartmentalized life becomes untenable.
Overall, The Apprentice is an effective character study. A little too neat, perhaps, but every major element comes from well-documented events in Donald Trump’s life. The Apprentice inspires reflection not just about how close this thug is to becoming POTUS again, but also the amount of time we’ve all spent writing, talking, and thinking about a pathologically narcissistic individual with no moral compass or empathy. What a waste.