‘The Apprentice’ faced the challenge of making us even more scared of Donald Trump. It managed it

The difficulty in making a satirical biopic about Donald Trump is that Trump himself will always be capable of shocking us more than anything we might say about him. The U.S. president is busy turning everything he does into a reality show, with his CEO Elon Musk and his Vice President J. D. Vance in prominent roles.

The televised bullying in the Oval Office of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, a leader resisting an invasion, would have been hardly credible in a movie, yet it happened in front of the cameras. Even the brilliant Saturday Night Live skit on the debacle performed the next day fell short of the jaw-dropping scene we had witnessed in the White House. The Trump show hasn’t let up since: the chaos of tariffs, the threats to his allies, migrants deported in chains, the compulsive signing of executive orders, Musk’s chainsaw, the Tesla showroom on the White House South Lawn, the so-called Gulf of America, and the end of his love affair with Wall Street.

Directed by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice is a biting biopic of the early Donald Trump, from the time he leaves his father’s business empire to build his own in the decadent New York of the 1970s to when it took off in the 1980s with the inauguration of the iconic Trump Tower. Over that period, we see not just an evolution but a transformation: at first, he is an impetuous and insecure young man, eager for recognition; later, he is narcissistic and ruthless and many other things besides.

In a very unpoliticized Academy Awards ceremony, due to the fact that Hollywood appears to be as cowed by Trump as the Democratic opposition, the film was up for two gongs: Sebastian Stan as lead actor for his portrayal of Trump and Jeremy Strong as supporting actor for his role as Cohn. Strong could just as well have been nominated for the former category as his role is far from supporting. The title is of course the title of the reality show presented by Trump from 2004 for its first 14 seasons. The constant “You’re fired!” on the show was a sign of things to come.

But the actual show does not feature in the film; the title is simply used to portray the fact that the tycoon was himself an apprentice to a man with few scruples and a shady history: Roy Cohn, a mafia-style lawyer and ultraconservative activist with a tough mask and plenty of secrets; a follower of Machiavelli whose coldness reminds us of Strong himself in the HBO series Succession.

Out of this period, Trumpism is born: it is the moment in Trump’s life when he replaces his millionaire father with whom he has a tricky relationship with Cohn, the mentor who will shape him and his future. Cohn dictates the three commandments that Trump will go on to apply to the letter. The first: attack, attack, attack; the second: admit nothing, deny everything; the third: no matter what happens, never assume defeat, but declare yourself the winner. Basically, aggression and lies. Or rather: What is truth? The truth is what I say.

The portrayal is not kind, but it avoids moralizing. We start with a young Trump chasing delinquent tenants and end up with him resorting to extortion and blackmail against anyone who gets in his way, hand in hand with Cohn. We also see him betray his family and lash out against local authorities who won’t give him what he wants. Naturally, Cohn himself will be discarded like a used Kleenex when it suits Trump — which happens to be before he dies of AIDS in 1986, a disease he denied until the end to avoid admitting he was gay.

The film even dares to portray Trump at his most intimate — taking amphetamines, and having a hair transplant and liposuction. But the most shocking scene is the one in which he rapes his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, after informing her of their separation the way he might fire an employee — the rape was mentioned by Zelnickova in the divorce proceedings. It is grotesque, but far from a parody: everything is based on published news and biographies. Against the odds, The Apprentice succeeds in shocking viewers. Seeing everything Trump gets up to in his early years is brutal, although today’s reality is no less so, and we are only 50 days into his second term.

The film was presented at Cannes in May and was released in the U.S. in a few theaters in October, weeks before the November election. As was to be expected, Trump blasted it as “defamatory, cheap and politically repugnant work;” and a “Hollywood electoral interference.” His lawyers demanded that the production company cancel the premiere, but there is no record of the promised lawsuit being filed.

Director Ali Abbasi says that this film is not about Trump, but about his relationship with Cohn, about how power corrupts and about the “broken reality” in which truth and lies are confused. In a way, the stark portrayal of the immorality of the U.S. president forces us to face a problem affecting the whole of society: nothing we know about Trump is going to dissuade those who vote either for him or for others like him.

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