The Apprentice (2024): The biopic Trump tried to ban is his most humanising portrait.

By: Raphael Hammond

Donald John Trump is nearly eight decades old. Understandably, millennials and younger haven’t watched his rise to infamy, from small-time real estate heir to the presidency of the United States. Nor do we understand the forces that shaped him on a personal level. Here, The Apprentice (2024) steps in. The film dramatises the Donald’s early business career and his relationship with the man who moulded him into his present form: Roy Cohn. Grainy, jarring, strangely lit, and seamlessly blended with news footage, it’s a front row seat on Trump’s most formative years.

The film’s earlier era is strikingly alien, a world apart from our own. A New York city that is experiencing malaise, where - rather than Billionaire’s Row casting ever longer shadows over Central Park - central city real estate rots away. Slurs are carelessly thrown around and children refer to fathers as ‘sir’. The symptoms of decay in the opening shots, set to high-octane music, are perhaps more familiar: burning buildings, police brutality and omnipresent sex work. 

The Trump we meet in the opening scenes is also not the one we know today.

Shifty, unconfident, he exists in the shadow of his older brother (an airline pilot), and his father, a property mogul. He collects rent from problem tenants, door-to-door, in squalid apartment buildings. His ambitions are dismissed, laughed at; he is referred to as ‘Fred’s Kid’. Only small elements we know– the pouting, the air of disappointment - shine through. His finances are dire, his family embroiled in a racial discrimination suit.

Enter Roy Cohn: vicious legal insider and self-styled ‘American patriot’ – willing to break every rule in the book to get what he wants: a mafia boss in all but name, a lawyer whose clients work for him as much as he works for them. Jeremy Strong nails Cohn’s robotic yet articulate, flat yet vicious rhetorical style. After helping Trump with the discrimination case, Cohn channels Trump’s impulses into the delusionally self-confident, egotistical, bullying, orange, gesturing, ‘weave’-spewing, drug-fuelled billionaire-revolutionary who has loomed large over world politics since 2016. 

Trump, of course, was highly critical of the film upon release in 2024, calling it a ‘defamatory hatchet-job’. It faced legal issues and saw only a limited release in the United States. Watching it now, in the wake of Epstein files revelations, is almost haunting, as we know the sickness, callousness and depravity we see onscreen is a mere glimpse of the full picture. In each moment of power, lust and evil lurks the shadow of thousands more, of young girls’ lives broken, of dreams crushed, of women assaulted and slandered. But beyond the disgust, media that humanises Trump remains vital. Regardless of his mental decline, for the moment Trump still holds the keys to Washington, and we are all better off for understanding how his instincts came about.

His father’s constant dismissal laid the ground for his arrogance and constant need for attention and showmanship. His jealousy of people cleverer than him (notably his first wife, Ivana) built his desire to control them by force and denigrate them. Cohn’s Nixonite and Reaganite political tendencies and blatant corruption, blackmail and offensive style clearly rubbed off on him. 

The Apprentice issues a stark warning on forming relationships with Trump. He will betray and deceive anyone. Starmer, Rutte and Mamdani: take note. When Trump outgrew Cohn, he left him in the dust. Cohn is incapable of telling Trump, or for that matter anyone else, that he’s dying of AIDS, claiming he feels “like a million bucks” when he looks white as a sheet. Trump, meanwhile, is incapable of acknowledging the profound influence of Cohn on his character – recycling Cohn’s lessons to him word for word, without attribution – placing credit on his ‘natural killer instincts’ for giving him the edge. The mutual buttering-up he engages in with Cohn in some of his final moments is empty, meaningless. 

The film ends with a zoom in on Trump, his face grotesquely caked in makeup, his piercing blue eyes staring at the viewer, into the future. The Apprentice’s Trump, and his flaws, echo into our present with devastating clarity.

Image: Flickr