10/44
CutlerPublisher: BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited
Tale
The story of how a young Donald Trump started his real estate business in the 1970s and 1980s in New York with the help of infamous lawyer Roy M. Cohn. Roger Stone, a longtime collaborator of Donald Trump and Roy M. Cohn, admitted that Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Cohn was “astonishing in its accuracy.” [From the trailer] Roy Cohn: Rule Three: No matter what happens, you declare victory and never admit defeat. Appears in The 7PM Project: October 11, 2024 episode (2024). Anti Anti AntiConsumer MadeLicensed courtesy of Domino Publishing Company Limited, (PRS) obo In The Red RecordingsAuthor: Paul B.
It is much more nuanced and complicated
The title “The Apprentice” refers to both Donald Trump’s television show and Trump’s relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn. The film is neither a rebuttal nor a glowing testimony. The first half of the film is set in 1973. Donald Trump is collecting rent from nonpaying tenants. He and his father have been sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination. Their lawyers urge them to settle down and move on.
Trump opens his namesake skyscraper
But then the 27-year-old Trump meets Roy Cohn. A shady figure on the fringes of right-wing politics (he rose to fame as a top adviser to Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt), Cohn recommends that the Trumps take the lead and file a lawsuit against the federal government. Under Cohn’s guidance, the case closes without an admission of guilt. Cohn also guides Trump through the machinations of New York politics, helping him buy out the boarded-up Commodore Hotel, secure tax breaks from the city government, and ultimately turn the property into a Hyatt hotel at Grand Central Station. Along the way, Cohn teaches the impressionable Trump three rules: 1) attack, attack, attack, 2) deny everything, admit nothing, 3) no matter what actually happens, always declare victory. The second half of the film is set in the early 1980s.
However, Cohn’s influence eventually wanes
He becomes convinced that Atlantic City’s casinos will be his path to untold riches. And he hires a writer to write “The Art of the Deal.” By this point, he has fully mastered the art of self-promotion. At its core, “The Apprentice” is an origin story. Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (“The Holy Spider,” “The Border”) and “Vanity Fair” writer Gabriel Sherman convincingly argue that Trump was shaped, almost created, by Roy Cohn. Even as Trump’s star rose in the 1980s, Cohn fell from grace (he was disbarred for stealing from clients) and became marginalized. He eventually died of AIDS (though he claimed until his dying breath that he had liver cancer).
The acting here is excellent
By the time The Art of the Deal was released, Trump had decided that Cohn’s three principles and his own fame had been based on Trump’s ideas all along. Director Abbasi also highlights the strange coincidences that have helped Trump thrive: a ruthless, winner-take-all version of capitalism that idolizes those who succeed; a legal system easily manipulated by the wealthy to crush their opponents or delay the day of reckoning (this film received a “cease and desist” order from Trump’s lawyers after its screening at Cannes); an American political system that has no idea how to restrain an individual who acts according to Cohn’s three principles. As Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong (Kendall on the TV series “Succession”) is simply fascinating. He convincingly embodies Cohn’s inner contradictions: a lawyer who shows total contempt for the legal system, a Jew who professes anti-Semitism, and a man who hides his homosexual orientation and publicly shames homosexuality at every opportunity.