I Bet They Don't Go See The Apprentice
At a Coachella MAGA rally on Saturday— opening acts included child molesters Ken Calvert and Matt Gaetz, as well Dennis Quaid and Nazi Stephen Miller— Trump was going through his whole falsehood-laden xenophobic song and dance when a young woman objected. Trump told the crowd to knock the hell out of her. Addressing the woman, he said “Back home to mommy, she goes back home to mommy. Was that you darling? And she gets the hell knocked out of her. Her mother’s a big fan of ours, you know that right? Her father, her mother. You always have that.” She was kicked out of the rally.
Early Sunday, Sahil Kapur reported that Señor T “is ramping up his rhetoric depicting his political rivals and critics as criminals, while dropping a long trail of suggestions that he favors outlawing political speech that he deems misleading or challenges his claims to power. In a speech Friday in Aurora, Colorado, the Republican presidential nominee blasted the immigration system and lobbed a rhetorical grenade at his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris. ‘She’s a criminal. She’s a criminal,’ said Trump, who was found guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in his New York hush money trial. ‘She really is, if you think about it.’ It’s a pattern of messaging that has long been part of Trump’s stump speeches but has escalated significantly in his 2024 candidacy. In the final stretch to the Nov. 5 election, the [fascist candidate] has developed a tendency to claim that speech he disapproves of is illegal, even if it is protected by the First Amendment.”
An expert who studies authoritarianism and fascism said Trump’s rhetoric about criminalizing dissent is familiar, and could carry serious implications for the country if he’s elected president.
“This is out of the autocratic playbook. As autocrats consolidate their power once they’re in office, anything that threatens their power, or exposes their corruption, or releases information that’s harmful to them in any way becomes illegal,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and professor at New York University who wrote the 2020 book “Strongmen: From Mussolini to the Present.”
“He’s actually rehearsing, in a sense, what he would be doing as head of state, which is what Orban does, Modi is doing, Putin has long done,” she said, referring to the leaders of Hungary, India and Russia, respectively. “Just as there’s a divide now because of this brainwashing about who is a patriot and who is a criminal about Jan. 6, right? In the same way, telling the truth in any area— journalists, scientists, even people like me, anybody who is engaged in objective inquiry, prosecutors, of course— they become criminal elements and they need to be shut down.”
… Trump has responded to criticisms of his authoritarian rhetoric by repeatedly claiming Democrats are the real fascists and accusing them of “weaponizing” the government against him. His campaign didn't return messages seeking comment for this article.
If he’s elected, could Trump actually succeed at centralizing power for himself, in a system built on checks and balances that was often successful at restraining him during his first term.
“That’s the big question,” Ben-Ghiat said, adding that it depends partly on his ability to impose party fealty, intimidate critics and install competent bureaucrats who are effective at using levers of power to advance his personal aims.
“It is about criminalizing dissent,” she said. “There is a method to his madness in that he has taken people on a journey of indoctrination.”
Historically, voter hostility to dissent often emerges in authoritarian and fascist regimes, where those in power seek to delegitimize opposition. This phenomenon has deep roots in various autocratic movements, where dissent is seen as unpatriotic or even criminal. In fascist Italy under Mussolini, for example, dissenting voices were silenced, with the regime labeling opposition as enemies of the state. Similarly, in Nazi Germany, dissent was crushed under the guise of national unity, with critics often being accused of betraying the country.
In democratic societies, while dissent is protected under laws like the First Amendment in the U.S., figures who lean towards authoritarianism, such as Trump, often attempt to frame dissent as unpatriotic or criminal. This kind of rhetoric can resonate with certain voters, particularly those drawn to strongman politics, who may view dissenters as threats to their vision of national unity or security.
When I was a kid, I experienced that hostility first hand when Nixon supporters went as far as physically attacking long-hairs and college students they felt opposed Nixon and the Vietnam War. By the time Nixon had given his “silent majority” speech in 1969 positioned his supporters as the true patriots, while framing anti-war protesters as a disruptive minority undermining national stability, I was already living abroad. We didn’t have cell phones or the internet but weekly I read about what was happening back in the States and how much more aggressive and violent the reaction to anti-war protesters from right-wing Nixon supporters had become. The long hair and countercultural appearance of many student activists symbolized opposition to traditional values, making them targets. Nixon supporters, identifying with conservative, pro-military, and patriotic values, egged on by Republicans, viewed these dissenters as both morally and politically dangerous. This culminated in violent clashes, such as the Kent State shootings in 1970, where four peaceful students were murdered by the National Guard during protests against the war. The demonization of dissenters as enemies of the state, or in Trump’s case, as criminals or threats to national unity, is very much lifted right out of Nixon’s (and Mussolini’s playbooks). Simply put, authoritarians galvanize support by framing dissent as a threat, thereby creating an atmosphere in which followers not only reject dissent but also feel justified in attacking it. The social divide of the Nixon era and the resulting hostility toward protesters mirrors many of the dynamics we're seeing today. By portraying dissenters as enemies or criminals, leaders like Trump, Putin and Modi cultivate an environment where voters not only tolerate but also support the suppression of opposing views.
Trump's comments on Saturday encouraging violence against a heckler follow this pattern— dissent being met with hostility rather than debate, effectively reducing the space for free expression in a democracy. This relationship between authoritarianism, dissent, and voter attitudes can be traced back to multiple historical periods where citizens, driven by fear or nationalism, accept or even demand the repression of dissent to maintain social order or political power.
I haven’t seen The Apprentice yet but I’ve written about it. Greg Olear did both and noted that Trump is, essentially, “An insecure, unlovable bully, desperate for everyone— but rich, famous, and powerful people especially— to respect him, if not love him. This profound, debilitating insecurity is what animates his drive to succeed, and his achievements exist only to feed an insatiable need for positive regard. There’s nothing interesting about that kind of character. We’ve seen it a million times in movies, TV shows, novels— so many times that even Donald’s true self is a cliché. Yawn... Making cinematic gold out of this lame story is nothing less than filmmaking alchemy.”
At rise, Donald is 27 years old. He works at a rent collector at his old man’s apartment complex: a lowly position in the family business. He is a solitary figure, aloof. He has watched his older brother try in vain to win the pride of his father, and he wants to succeed where Freddy has failed. Ambition radiates off him like stink from a fart. He is hungry. He wants.
An apprentice needs a master, and young Donald soon finds one in the person of 46-year-old Roy Cohn— former federal prosecutor, former Joe McCarthy chief counsel, hard SOB who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair— played with steely menace and pitch-perfect Bronx accent by Jeremy Strong (who clearly has a thing for characters named Roy). When we meet Cohn, he is ensconced in a private room in the private club, surrounded by movers and shakers like “Fat Tony” Salerno, head of the Genovese crime family (who, alas, never reappears). Others in his orbit include Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, Rupert Murdoch, and Andy Warhol, the pop artist who Trump, to great comic effect, does not recognize.
Donald likes Roy because he wants to be him; Roy likes Donald because he wants to do him. The latter never happens; the former does, and is the subject of The Apprentice, which spans the pair’s first meeting in late 1973 to Cohn’s death in 1986.
I must confess, after about ten minutes, I found myself forgetting that this was a movie about the early life of the hateful fascist now running for president. Through what actorly hocus pocus I do not know, Sebastian Stan makes Trump sympathetic(!). There are moments in the film, early on, when I found myself, in spite of myself, rooting for him. We are conditioned to have such feelings in movies like this; if we aren’t invested, the film fails. We want the main character to stand up to his asshole father, to make his own way, to succeed.
And succeed young Donald does. He learns ruthlessness at the feet of his ruthless master. He elbows his way into the tabloids. In his tangles with Mayor Ed Koch, who calls him out on his shady business practices (i.e., stiffing his workers), he workshops modes of attack with which we have all become familiar. He realizes his dream of turning the decrepit Commodore Hotel— a boarded-up husk of a building at Grand Central, with hookers and drug dealers patrolling the streets outside, in a graffitied Midtown Manhattan that today’s Trump wants the rest of America to believe NYC still looks like— into something special. He promises to bring New York back. And he is part of its renaissance. Or so the film asks us to believe.
…The rape of Ivana is the most important scene in the film. It is at that moment when any vestige of kindness or grace or human decency left in Donald’s soul flies away forever, when Mr. Hyde kills off Dr. Jekyll, when Anakin Skywalker becomes Darth Vader— or, more accurately, when Donald Trump becomes Roy Cohn. That he is able to physically perform in that moment, just after telling Ivana he is no longer sexually attracted to her, is also important: his addiction to diet pills, his lack of quality sleep, and his swollen belly have left him struggling with erectile dysfunction. The message here is clear: Only rape arouses this monster now.
Doubling down on Hunt’s reporting, the film also shows the scalp reduction surgery, which Donald undergoes along with liposuction; he doesn’t believe in exercise, and wants to lose the fat the easy way. But in The Apprentice, the surgery happens after the rape, not before it, and is not botched. Artistic license, don’t you know. (My guess is, the visually yuck scenes of Trump undergoing cosmetic surgery will vex him, and any MAGA who might see the film, much more than the marital rape sequence.)
…In the scene where we meet Roger Stone for the first time— because Cohn hooked Stone up with Trump, just as he hooked Rupert Murdoch up with Trump, and god knows how many mobsters— Trump is sitting next to Cohn, who is stretched out upon a tanning bed. His skin, one can’t help but notice, is not bronze but orange. Even that, the film is telling us, one of the trademark aspects of Donald’s physical appearance, is purloined from Roy Cohn.
The world of literature knows Cohn from Angels in America, the breathtaking Tony Kushner play set in the darkest days of the AIDS crisis. In the play, too, he is an attack dog who refuses to accept reality and never admits defeat. The master who taught Trump everything he knows died of complications from HIV, denying to his dying breath that he had AIDS. He passed away a few weeks after his legal disbarment— he’d forged the signature of a comatose client, making himself the executor of his estate. In the grand scheme of his lifetime of evildoing, the disbarment was small potatoes, but also just desserts.
Cohn suffered mightily, and he died miserably and alone— but he lived just long enough to watch all his power and influence evaporate, and to know the sting of public shame and the humiliation of legal trouble. In the end, the man who denied everything could not deny to himself that he was a loser.
May his apprentice meet the same fate.
Amen.
“There’s a lot of discussion now on how to curb those entities to guarantee accountability on facts. But if people go to one source that has an agenda and puts out disinformation, our First Amendment stands as a major block to just hammer it out of existence.” – John Kerry
In america, who is hated more: The nazi bully? or the hapless pussy?
Our politics has been devolving into this "onliest possible" choice since 1966 when your democraps pussified and stopped even trying to improve society AND refused to prosecute nixon for treason... and that was just fine with you all. Instead of flushing a party as worthless as tits on a buick, you all just bent over and grabbed your ankles. ON FUCKING PURPOSE!
Now that we're here, it is inevitable that the bully wins and is followed devoutly as a demigod; and the pussies lose and are likely dealt with harshly. It was thus in Germany and 6 million pussies were gassed (to say nothing of 64 millio…