“It’s just a movie about a human being,” said Ali Abbasi, director of the engrossing Trump bio-pic that Team Trump nearly scuttled and Trump boosters and loathers have denounced as, respectively, a slander and a whitewash. James Fallows lauds The Apprentice for achieving “something I would have thought impossible, by making Trump, briefly in his youth, seem to [merit] sympathy and even pity.”
The film is indeed an Aristotelian tragedy, instilling fear and pity for an outsized character undone by a fatal flaw, a monster whose pain we come to feel. But the sympathetic monster isn’t Donald Trump. It’s the prince of darkness himself, formerly Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hatchet man and Donald Trump’s lawyer and mentor, the über-fixer Roy Cohn.
Yes, the young Trump, convincingly played by Sebastian Stan, is a naïf, a Bronx boy on the make who, at one of Cohn’s coke-fueled rightwing bacchanals, asks a white-wigged Andy Warhol, “What do you do?” and “Are you successful?” At the same time, naiveté lets Trump see New York rising from the grimy chaos of the 1970s Taxi Driver (vividly realized by Abbasi) and jumpstart Manhattan’s revival—with ample public subsidies, extorted by Cohn. He’s a smirking blond version of the Obama “Hope” poster.
Cohn, in Jeremy Strong’s masterfully deadpan portrayal, is indeed ruthless and reptilian. And Trump is spellbound by Cohn’s savvy, shamelessness, and sharp suits. But to say young Donald is an innocent empty vessel that Cohn fills with venom is to give Trump one more pass in a lifetime of indulgences.
Cohn doesn’t create a self-proclaimed “killer”; he draws out what is already there. It’s Trump who pursues and seduces Cohn—just as he woos a certain spirited Czech fashion model named Ivana with pleas, braggadocio, limo rides, flowers by the cartload, and irresistible persistence. (This is the film’s most, maybe only, endearing episode, straight out of a ‘30s screwball comedy. Maria Bakalova is terrific, as is the whole ensemble.) He tells both (sincerely, at least in her case) that he loves them, and goes on to betray and humiliate them.
That’s fair turnabout for someone who, like the movie Cohn, tells his apprentice, “You have to be willing to do anything to anybody to win.” But in the film as in life, this devil has a soft, sentimental side. He loves the red-white-and-blue, don’t-tread-on-me U S of A. Cohn really did lead revelers in belting out patriotic anthems, and it’s wonderfully weird to see Warhol chime in on “God Bless America.” He loves his boy-toy companion, Russell Eldridge. He loves Donald Trump. And he’s loyal, by his lights, to all three.
“You’re gorgeous,” Cohn tells the bright-eyed, bushy-haired boy who’s just enlisted him as an attorney, brushing Trump’s cheek. “A real Adonis.” This proves to be more like parental praise—something Trump never got from his icy father—than a come-on. Donny boy is the son he never had, the protégé who will carry on the legacy summed up in Roy’s Cohn’s golden rules: “Attack, attack, attack. Admit nothing. Deny everything. Always claim victory, never admit defeat.”
In the end, however, Trump’s heart goes to just one thing: “I love making deals,” he tells his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, “the deal” being the essence of winning, domination, and everything else that matters in his zero-sum world. As Michael Bloomberg put it (offscreen), “he cheats everybody.” Cohn unwittingly sets the love-struck Donald up to betray Ivana when he prods him to get a prenup and marriage becomes just another deal. The Donald tries to betray his entire family by tricking his dementia-addled father into signing a release making him sole trustee of the family fortune, until his observant mother intervenes.
The onscreen Trump suffers remorse only once, after turning away his anguished, alcoholic older brother Fred Jr., whom he and their father had belittled for becoming a mere pilot (“a chauffeur, a bus driver”), and “Freddy” dies young. But he doesn’t acknowledge it; in a tour de force of strangled emotion, Stan shakes, blubbers, wails “Please don’t look at me! Stop touching me!” at Ivana, washes his hands like Lady Macbeth on overdrive—and soldiers on making deals, breaking deals, and building his own myth.
Inevitably, the student surpasses the master, and The Apprentice enacts a familiar trope: the usurping protégé of The Favourite and Something About Eve. After learning all the tricks, Trump self-inflates, self-promotes, and self-aggrandizes on a scale Cohn could only dream of. Cohn, meanwhile, crumbles before two implacable adversaries: the IRS and AIDS, which, true to form, he denies having, just as he denies being homosexual.
Trump, who pursued Cohn so ardently, now puts off taking his calls. “I don’t need Roy,” he tells Ivana. “I don’t need anybody.” Nevertheless, he grudgingly assents when Cohn begs him to provide a room at the Grand Hyatt for his companion Russell, who’s dying of AIDS. And he throws a birthday bash for his old mentor at Mar-a-Lago, after confirming with his doctor that he can’t catch HIV from being in the same room.
The party, the film’s most unsettling scene, is a grand exercise in humiliation. “I miss you Roy,” toastmaster Trump declares. “You’re the only guy who cared about me.” He then delivers the coup de grace: “He truly is a loyal guy. It’s a matter of honor with him”—loyalty and honor being weaknesses that have no place in a winner’s world.
Ivana whispers to Cohn that the supposedly diamond-studded “Trump” and “Tower” cufflinks her husband gave him are really cheap curios he gives everybody. A jumbo American-flag cake, with sparklers for candles, arrives with the flag upside-down—a potent if heavy-handed reminder of the MAGA response to Biden’s inauguration 35 years later, when upside-down flags flew outside the homes of Justice Samuel Alito and other supporters.
Cohn is devastated. After the party, Trump, an avowed germaphobe and future scourge of blood-poisoning immigrant vermin, has the room fumigated by a hazmat-suited crew.
When Russell dies, Trump hands Cohn, who didn’t charge for his legal services, a bill for the Hyatt stay, and the king is finally toppled. “I made you!” Cohn laments. “I think I made myself,” Trump replies coolly. “It’s good to see you’ve lost all trace of decency,” Cohn sniffs—another echo, this time of the past, when Army lawyer Joseph Welch famously asked Cohn’s boss Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?”
It’s fun spotting these thematic wormholes, but they’re pieces in a caricature, not insights into a soul. Then again, Trump has devoted his life to creating a studied self-caricature. Stan’s Trump becomes less and less a person, more an assemblage of boasts, postures, insults, and resentments, on the way to becoming the lurid shell of a performance artist we know today—a Citizen Kane without a Rosebud. And so Strong’s heartbroken Cohn becomes the film’s emotional center.
Is all this true? At the very least, a lot of it is, from what I know of what may be the most documented and most contested presidential life in American history. Aziz and journalist-turned-screenwriter Gabriel Sherman may have nicked, tucked, and compressed, but they haven’t speculated in the way of, say, Oliver Stone’s also unexpectedly sympathetic Nixon.
Will it change anybody’s vote? I doubt it. But it may give some viewers a bit of consolation. If Roy Cohn can come to his humanity, might the country come to its senses?
With this, there’s now enough material to stage a Roy Cohn film festival. “Angels in America” would be Day One all by itself, then Day Two could include “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” and “Bully. Coward. Victim. The Story of Roy Cohn.” “The Apprentice” would be the grand finale.