The Apprentice (2024)

The best are full of passionate intensity while the worst lack all convictions

A film exploring the relationship, in the ‘70s and ‘80s, between lawyer and right-wing fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and the young, inexperienced son of a shady property developer, played by Sebastian Stan: Donald J. Trump.

We’ve been suffering some existential angst here at Metropolitan HQ since Trump assumed office seven weeks ago. (Seven weeks, holy hell.) Writing a pop culture newsletter feels flaccid and ludicrous, like pushing marshmallows up your nose while a very serious doctor gives you a terminal diagnosis.

But then, nobody wants our geopolitical analysis. (Just FYI it consists of the letters ‘a’, ‘r’, ‘g’ and ‘h’.) For the avoidance of doubt, The Metropolitan believes that Trump and all his associates are worthless, godforsaken motherfuckers. Beyond that we don’t have much to contribute, unless you count general solidarity, some hand tools, and Tobias’s prodigious collection of tinned beans. If you want some political sustenance we recommend Ezra Klein’s podcast and Sam Freedman’s Substack. The determinedly ecumenical Not Another One podcast is coming into its own as well.

From us, in lieu of anything more insightful, here are some quick thoughts on The Apprentice. Just as a warning: it includes a scene of sexual violence that (to our eyes) is editorially justified and unprurient, and is extremely tough to watch.

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The main concern of The Apprentice is to show the Trump origin story; like Endeavour, but a whole lot less wholesome and relaxing. Its thesis is that Trump was moulded by three things: his professional friendship with the virulently right-wing lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who gave him harsh lessons in the politics of power; the moral, financial and structural bankruptcy of ‘70s New York, which offered all kinds of shady opportunities; and his strained relationship with his father (Martin Donovan! One for the Hal Hartley fans.)

The first two factors come to the fore as the film places Trump firmly within the long-term trends of US right-wing politics. (In this, The Apprentice is a good companion piece to the wonderful 2020 series Mrs America.) Cohn is much given to extolling ‘democracy’, but for him ‘democracy’ is not a peaceful political system in which power is conferred through free and universal suffrage. Instead, its important characteristics are opposition to communism and the emphasis on individual freedom. As Cohn tells Trump: ‘This is a nation of men, not laws.’ The film makes great play of ‘Roy Cohn's three rules of winning’ as a template for Trump’s behaviour:

‘The first rule is the simplest. Attack, attack, attack! Rule two. Admit nothing, deny everything. Rule three. This is the most important rule of all. Okay? No matter what happens... no matter what they say about you, no matter how beaten you are: you claim victory and never admit defeat.’

These rules, you’ll notice, are not for success. Nor are they rules for happiness, or making friends and influencing people, or anything stupid and weak like that. They are rules for winning. And in order for you to win, someone has to lose. This is a zero-sum game. Pain – for someone else – is a requirement.

The Apprentice isn’t very subtle; it’s didactic and furious. But we’re all desperate for an explanation of how Trump came to be the hateful, gummy heap that he is, this monstrous election-winning titan, this garish snake-charmer of the American soul. How, for instance, did he come by his weirdly effective tactic of asserting that two plus two equals three, in the face of unimpeachable evidence to the contrary? Here, at least, is an explanation. Who knows whether it’s true?

Cohn is a man of the early Cold War, of the Bay of Pigs and the Tet Offensive; but Trump doesn’t have Cohn’s obsession with communism. (We’re never really told why he doesn’t.) He is instead a creature of the ‘80s, and the moral core of his ideology is acquisitiveness, plain and simple. This is the world in which ‘greed is good’, in the words of Gordon Gecko in Wall Street (1987); ‘good’ not just in the sense of ‘a useful tool’, but ‘good’ as opposed to ‘evil’, a moral good. Rich is right. ‘Nobody with a good car needs to be justified’, as the street preacher Hazel Motes insists in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood (1952).

Together with Cohn’s Three Rules this coalesces into Trump’s brand of power politics, of having no cause beyond getting power and holding on to it; and his politics of dominance, the assertion and protection of the self. And if this is your credo, The Apprentice says, then you can justify almost anything: betraying your friends, hurting your loved ones, lying, cheating, stealing, and finally corrupting an entire country while withholding anti-HIV medication and other life-sustaining supplies from the world’s most vulnerable people.

As an explanation, it still lacks a certain something. The article of faith – in Trump’s case, greed – feels immaterial; we all have articles of faith. We all have causes or beliefs (or people) for which we are prepared to lie or cheat or steal, at a push. None of this explains the hallucinatory sociopathy of Trump’s behaviour, his unlimited appetite for pointless, malignant fuckery. It also doesn’t explain how a man who seems so fundamentally stupid has achieved such success. It’s impossible for most of us to watch Trump and not think that an essential part of his soul is somehow missing, and no amount of exposure to Roy Cohn can explain that. Although the film does posit that Trump ingested an awful lot of prescription drugs in the ‘80s and that this caused a catastrophic rupture in his personality, like Voldemort creating Horcruxes.

But these are philosophical questions – or, at least, they are questions to which nobody yet has neat answers. While you’re waiting for something more convincing, you could do a lot worse than watching The Apprentice, particularly if you actually remember the ‘80s; it’s intercut with archive footage – New York really was a wreck back then – and you can almost smell the hairspray. There’s a great use of ‘Blue Monday’ to introduce a doom-laden segment, as is traditional.

And the performances are great. There is very little upon which we agree with the virulently right-wing American political consultant Roger Stone, but he is right when he says that Jeremy Strong is extremely good as Stone’s friend Roy Cohn. For anyone interested in US politics and even mildly on the left Cohn is a hate-figure, but the character’s arc demands vulnerability and tragedy too. Strong hits all of the notes, clear as a bell. He’s an astonishing shape-shifter.

Cohn’s arc provides the movie with one of its two moral cores. The other is that of Ivana Trump (Ivanka’s mother), played by Maria Bakalova with a charming brittleness. It’s a horribly convincing portrait of a gutsy and fundamentally guileless young woman who thinks she’s in control.

Sebastian Stan is also great. Impersonating the world’s most famous and reviled individual must have seemed like a thankless task, but he pulls it off without veering into comedic territory. He perfectly adopts Trump’s strange, wandering cadence and his unsettlingly prissy moue without letting it overwhelm the performance.

He is particularly convincing in showing the young Trump’s vulnerability and nakedly amateur ambition. It is a raw, desperate thing, not yet braced in Cohn’s armour of age and success and advanced sociopathy. And the portraits of Trump’s parents, his monstrous father and his simmering mother (a small but electrifying performance by Catherine McNally) give you a sense of what a shitty childhood he had. For a few very brief moments, scattered throughout the film, you find yourself feeling a little bit sorry for Donald Trump.

And then you remember where you are.

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For a slightly more reassuring vision of democracies, with fewer fascists and more people dressed as bins, there’s always the great British tradition of election night: