Whiny Little Bitch Donald Trumpanzee Doesn’t Like How He’s Portrayed In New Biopic, The Apprentice

He's Suing... Sure He Is

Trump has so many court cases pending that no one can keep track and now he’s adding another. He’s suing the filmmakers behind the The Apprentice, the movie about his early life in the real estate business and his formative relationship with Mafia lawyer Roy Cohn.

But let’s start with right-wing billionaire, Dan Snyder, a notoriously crooked businessman and former owner of the Washington Commanders, who is widely considered to be one of the worst owners in the history of professional sports and who helped finance the film. On Monday, when the film debuted at Cannes, Variety reported that Snyder has been apoplectic about it. He thought he was investing in a pro-Trump MAGA propaganda movie and flipped out when he saw the film, which portrays Trump in a more realistic, unflattering light.

“Behind the scenes,” wrote Tatiana Siegel, “a nasty battle has played out between the Snyder-backed company Kinematics and the filmmakers over the creative direction of the film. The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi, covers Trump’s early years when he was mentored by political fixer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) and his marriage to his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova). Sources say Snyder, a friend of Trump’s who donated $1.1 million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign, put money into the film via Kinematics because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president. Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious. Kinematics’ lawyers were enlisted to fight the release of The Apprentice, and the cease-and-desist letters began flying... Sources familiar with the back and forth say Snyder took issue with multiple aspects of the film and weighed in on what should be changed. In earlier versions of the screenplay, The Apprentice featured a scene where Trump rapes Ivana. One insider, familiar with the scene that is in the current cut, described it as ‘violent’ and ‘uncomfortable’ and follows a fight between the couple. (In a 1989 divorce deposition, Ivana accused Trump of raping her. But Ivana— who died in 2022— later refuted these claims in 2015, saying, ‘The story is totally without merit. Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of.’)

Other investors include the governments of Canada, Ireland and Denmark. “Heading into Cannes,” reported Siegel, “there was intense interest from potential buyers for the film, which is seeking U.S. distribution ahead of the election in November. International sales outfit Rocket Science is shopping the title at the Marche alongside CAA and WME. Complicating matters, Snyder’s Kinematics has a voice in sales negotiations. The filmmakers have intentionally eschewed any press, wanting the movie to speak for itself. After all, they’ve endured a long haul to the finish line. In fact, it took seven years for The Apprentice to make it to the big screen. One financier dropped out after the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the Capitol following his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. Another opted not to get involved after Ivana Trump’s death. 

This morning, CNN’s review described the film as an “exploration of power and ambition set in a world of corruption and deceit... A scene of the former president undergoing liposuction drew audible gasps from the crowd, the [Hollywood Reporter] reported.

“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Steven Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesperson, said in a statement to CNN. “This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”

The Washington Post review emphasized that Trump is a rapist— and long before E. Jean Carroll. Jada Yuan wrote that had the film debuted in the US instead of Cannes, there might have been another MAGA riot.

There had been spots of laughter, especially during moments of physical comedy, like when Trump slips on ice while courting Ivana and boastfully telling her he knows how to ski. But, by and large, it is a very dark and chilling origin story.

[Sebastian] Stan’s Trump is not a clown but a vicious “killer,” as the character categorizes his ambition. In details that seem to be based on a 1990 divorce deposition from Ivana Trump, we see him go under the knife, in gory detail, to get liposuction and a scalp reduction surgery, as a solution to his growing love handles and bald spot.

…He’s also depicted receiving oral sex from a topless blonde in Atlantic City while married.

…As they were making the film, Abbasi told the crowd, he had so many people question why he would choose Trump as his subject matter, or why he didn’t wrap up what he wanted to say about the world in an allegory about the American Revolution or the Second World War.

“But the point is there is no nice metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism,” he said. “There’s only the messy way … there’s only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, on its own level, and it’s not going to be pretty, but I think … that the good people have been quiet for too long. So I think it’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again.”

Later on, at a party celebrating his new film, Abbasi told The Washington Post: “He’s a complex character. I think anyone who thinks Donald Trump is stupid or banal or superficial is gravely mistaken. I think a lot of my liberal friends think that because he doesn’t speak as eloquently as Barack Obama, he’s dumb and he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

He continued: “He has a very intuitive, actual ability to understand the masses. The Donald Trump in the movie is a construct, you know? I can call it a persona. And I can’t say that I decoded him.”

Early griping about the film, from the select few who’d seen it before the premiere, centered on how favorably Trump comes across in the first half. Stan plays him as a cocky, endearing kid, eager to earn his emotionally withholding father’s approval by building the biggest, most gaudy buildings in New York.

Determined to build his own legacy on the skyline of a city that was crumbling and emptying out in the late ’70s and early ’80s, Trump befriends Cohn, who helps the Trump family out when the Justice Department sues them for discriminating against Black rental applicants to their buildings. Cohn was the one who came up with the idea to countersue the government for $100 million.

Almost as soon as they meet, Cohn is teaching Trump life lessons that still seem to be ones he lives by— and that he laid out in his book The Art of the Deal:

1) Attack, attack, attack. (“If someone comes at you with a knife, you hit them with a bazooka,” Stan’s Trump later says.)

2) Admit nothing and deny everything.

3) Never admit defeat.

“I thought that the director’s voice was incredibly bold, and it was a funny take but also incredibly impactful,” said Michelle J. Li, a 27-year-old costume designer from New York, outside the theater. “When you see him portrayed as a human, it makes all these wild choices that we know him to have made even more [frightening].”

“It’s a lot easier to write off monsters as if they’re a fable,” said her friend Reece Feldman, 25, who works in digital marketing for film. “But when they’re depicted as people, you realize that their choices come from something within as opposed to just like a storybook [evil].”

The Vulture review is pretty scathing: The Apprentice Gets Dumber the Longer It Goes On. Bilge Ebiri wrote “This time, those hangdog eyes shine like little pools of predatory menace; the wide-open mouth, the slight forward hunch of the neck suggest a beast curious about its next meal. Thanks to his role on Succession, Jeremy Strong has in the last few years become one of our most familiar faces, but he remains an emotional chameleon, able to quickly project a single, precise feeling and, in the next minute, its opposite, with only the slightest of shifts. As Roy Cohn, the notorious right-wing lawyer who took a young Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) under his wing in the 1970s, Strong fixes all the attention in The Apprentice on himself, the way that he seems to direct his own penetrating gaze at his latest quarry. We watch him watching Trump, and we wonder what he might think of us. If only the film were up to the challenge of matching Strong’s gaze… The Apprentice is a hodgepodge of scenes from the life of Trump and Cohn with little emotional fluidity. It does start off strong, with Cohn meeting the inexperienced young developer in a restaurant in the early 1970s, as a lonely Donald looks around awkwardly while his date steps away. There is something quaintly touching about these early scenes, which manage to briefly humanize Trump. We see the way his straight-arrow dorkiness is pulverized and reshaped by the imperious Cohn.”

Donald’s real bane is his cruel, racist monster of a father, Fred (Martin Donovan, scarily unrecognizable and just plain scary), who terrorizes his kids in an effort to turn them into “killers” (a.k.a. “winners”). The oldest kid, Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick), already an alcoholic but also possessing a natural bonhomie Donald lacks, bears the brunt of dad’s ire. Early scenes suggest, promisingly, that the film might pursue Donald and Fred Jr.’s own fraught story. Alas, the film only periodically checks in on that relationship, with Fred Jr. drunkenly staggering back into Donald’s life only a couple more times. This most tragic member of the Trump family thus becomes a mere narrative device.

Fred Sr. distrusts Cohn and warns his son away from him. (“He’s been indicted three times,” he exclaims to Donald— a laugh line, of course, for anyone who knows that Donald Trump was himself indicted four times in 2023 alone.) But Cohn, who has government contacts and a huge back room full of blackmail material on judges, senators, and anyone else he needs to influence, is too tempting a partner for Donald. With his refusal to let anything stand in his way, Cohn is the cheat code the obedient pushover son needs to win his father’s approval. What is Donald to Cohn? Another obedient client, perhaps? (“I don’t work for my clients, my clients work for me!” Cohn yells at one point.) Or maybe another decent-looking guy to have around. There’s a sexual power to the lawyer’s fascination with Trump that Strong layers in nicely, again largely through the power of his stare.

These early scenes set in the 1970s are shot with warm, shadowy interiors, replicating the celluloid look of period films. As the picture jumps forward to the 1980s, it takes on a lo-fi video flicker as well as shaky camerawork and choppy editing that recalls reality TV. The timing doesn’t necessarily work (the so-called “reality-TV revolution” came much later), but the garbage world of reality TV is of course what eventually returned the once-defeated Trump to relevancy, transforming him into a modern celebrity the way it’s turned so many unspeakable idiots into 21st-century cultural icons. Anyway, it’s one of the few good ideas Abbasi has here. But unlike everything else in the film, it’s probably too subtle to really hit.

Unfortunately, this movie, too, gets dumber as it goes along. It doesn’t help that Cohn is sidelined as he was in real life. Strong is the film’s (sorry) strongest asset, and whenever he’s not onscreen the whole thing loses much of its energy. Instead, we watch as the increasingly powerful Trump, now married to former model Ivana (Maria Bakalova), whom he wooed aggressively (and even somewhat charmingly) in the ’70s, begins to take on more and more of the qualities we now associate with him: His empty, hyperbolic statements; his increasing disgust with the world; his cruelty. Stan does a good Trump, but in so doing, he becomes less interesting as the film goes on; he tries to give Trump a human hesitancy in the earlier scenes, but eventually descends further and further into caricature.

And who can blame him? The film pretty much abandons the character and his story to signposts from now-familiar revelations: his adulteries, his ignoring his kids, his stiffing of workers, his collaboration with the mob, his diet pills, his hair treatments, his rape of Ivana. Along the way, we get appearances from Rupert Murdoch (Tom Barnett), Ed Koch (Ian D. Clark), Andy Warhol (Bruce Beaton), and Roger Stone (Mark Rendall), who, having gone from essentially being Cohn’s cabana boy to a GOP campaign strategist, tests out one of Reagan’s 1980 slogans on Trump: “Let’s Make America Great Again.”

The problem isn’t the fact that the film includes this stuff; it’s that it neglects the connective tissue that might make this character make sense as a person. (Oliver Stone’s George W. Bush biopic, W., had a similar problem, so the problem likely lies with this particular subgenre.) Trump is a monster, we get that, and we certainly don’t need a human portrait of this rough beast as he slouches his way to the White House again. But films do have to justify themselves on some level. At his premiere, Abbasi talked about tackling the rising tide of fascism head-on, but I’m not sure this choppy dress-up picture does that. And at some point we might wonder why we’re spending two hours watching a movie that, as it goes on, starts to feel more and more like a fancy, vaguely arty Saturday Night Live sketch that refuses to end.

Damn! I hope Netflix buys it.

Also— why doesn’t Trump sue Randy Rainbow too?