For all the criticisms of the likes of Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves never having run a business before, and therefore being quite clueless as to how a business should be run, The Apprentice’s storyline reveals that experience in running a business does not necessarily mean such people are the best candidates to run a country. The film looks at the early career of Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan). Having joined an exclusive membership club of some kind, he is called over to join Roy Cohn (1927-1986) (Jeremy Strong) at his (Cohn’s) table. It is mildly amusing to see Trump, albeit a young and inexperienced version of him, being torn to shreds by Cohn, a no-nonsense prosecuting lawyer who was known in America for his role as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy, himself best known for anti-Communist hearings in the 1950s.
The film, in a nutshell, blames Trump’s approach to everything on what Cohn told him, the attorney having taken on the real estate dealer as a mentee. As the film would have it, there are three principles or ‘rules’ that Trump bears in mind, because Cohn claimed to live by them. ‘Attack, attack, attack!’ is the first. Never be on the defensive. Second, do not admit wrongdoing. Deny absolutely everything. Third, always claim victory. Never admit defeat. And – bingo! We now know where that whole denial nonsense about losing the 2020 presidential election came from.
I suppose anyone already familiar with the life and times of Donald Trump may not find anything remotely surprising in this movie. For people like me who only really encountered him when he started starring in the American TV series The Apprentice (not, of course, to be confused with this film of the same name), all this context kept me engaged. The actual Trump had his actual lawyers send a cease-and-desist letter to the film’s producers: evidently, that went nowhere.
The Trump of the movie is a rapist – the film even goes as far as to show him shagging his first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) against her wishes, pushing her to the ground and ramming his member into her. The actual Ivana provided details of an assault that happened in 1989 in her divorce proceedings in 1990. Elsewhere, I did wince a bit when Trump was cut open for cosmetic reasons – a combination of liposuction and surgery on the scalp to tackle male pattern baldness. Cohn, meanwhile, is a mass of contradictions, ruthless when he wants to be, yet tearing into Trump when he apparently doesn’t show enough compassion, even though ‘Attack! Attack! Attack!’ is precisely what he told him to do in the first place. A secret homosexual who died from AIDS, he claimed to the end he had liver cancer, and his earlier work with McCarthy involved targeting and prosecuting gays.
There’s some very dark humour in this film that makes it a more palatable watch than a movie about Donald Trump might otherwise have been.
Four stars
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