The Apprentice: The Rise of Donald Trump

                            

The new film about Donald Trump, The Apprentice, has had some very bad publicity.  In fact it had difficulty even attaining a distributor in the USA since Trump’s legal team tried to block it through threats of legal action.  Then, on the day it debuted, candidate Trump blasted it online in his usual over the top manner. 

Don’t let this intimidate you.  It’s a more than decent film, and its worth viewing. Of the films I have reviewed on this substack site, it’s the best I have seen.  And it proves something that I have tried to maintain here. That you do not have to have hundreds of millions, or a name like Coppola, Ridley Scott, or Scorsese to make an entertaining film that is also interesting and well done.  Much of the credit for the picture  should go to the man who wrote the screenplay, Gabriel Sherman.  His script is well-paced, with vivid characters, playing along a strong thematic curve. The director, Ali Abbasi, has done a workmanlike job, avoiding cinematic gas.  He has essentially let the story play out in an adroit and well-composed manner. The temptation in a film like this, with such a bigger than life protagonist, was for overstatement.  Abbasi avoided that.

That title of course recalls the TV series that Trump used to host, and from which he made tons of money.  But, in this film, that is not the frame of reference.  The title refers to Trump’s tutoring under the wing of the famous—or infamous—attorney Roy Cohn. The fact that Trump was attracted to Cohn says something in and of itself.  Because Cohn was, to put it mildly, a rather unattractive character.  Why?

 Cohn began his career as a commie hunter working in the US attorney’s office in New York.  There he was under the influence of the rather controversial witness Elizabeth Bentley. Going upwards, as a prosecutor for the Justice Department, he influenced the decision to send both Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. When, in fact, even some conservative commentators maintain that Ethel was not a spy. Cohn’s chief witness against them, Ethel’s brother David Greenglass, was quite problematic. In fact he later admitted he lied about the role of Ethel.  His grand jury testimony, which Greenglass did not want opened during his lifetime, was declassified decades later.  It would seem to suggest that Cohn persuaded him to change his testimony at trial in order to implicate his sister. (NY Times, story by Sam Roberts, July 15, 2015) What makes this all worse is that Cohn wrote in his autobiography that he told the trial judge that Ethel was even worse than Julius. (Ranker, story by Elle Tharp, October 16, 2024)

He was then Senator Joe McCarthy’s chief legal counsel during his public and private hearings, which today are largely labeled witch hunts.  But these corresponded with the Lavender Scare, which pictured homosexuals as Red targets. Cohn pushed this even though he was gay, something he would never admit in public.  Cohn even worked against gay rights. (ibid, Tharp)  As conservative senator Alan Simpson maintained, it was the Lavender Scare which harmed far more people than McCarthy’s accusations. The suicide of Senator Lester Hunt was caused  by the threat of Cohn and McCarthy using his son’s homosexuality against the senator. When Cohn and McCarthy stepped too far, both the Army and Bobby Kennedy, who represented the Democrats, precipitated their defeat and McCarthy’s censure. (I strongly suggest the reader watch the TV film Citizen Cohn with James Woods for a good backgrounder on the man)

After McCarthy’s fall, Cohn returned to New York and began a prominent practice as a lawyer/fixer for wealthy people. These included  Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, mob figures like Tony Salerno and John Gotti, Studio 54 owners Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, and Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz.  As depicted in the film, it was in this rather exalted position, during the nightlife social scene, where Trump first met Cohn.

Cohn had already heard of Trump via the business activities of his father, Fred Sr. At this time, Fred was running middle class apartment developments, and Donald is  seen  at first knocking on doors and collecting rents. But in a quite appropriate motif, before that, the film actually opens with a TV broadcast of Richard Nixon’s famous plaint during Watergate, “I am not a crook.” Which seemed to me to be a clever use of a sort of topic sentence considering the men we will be considering: Trump, Cohn, and near the end, Roger Stone, who greatly admired Nixon.

In the early seventies, Cohn invites Trump to a private table at  a classy club and introduces him to some of his guests, including Salerno. Here Trump tells Cohn about a case the Justice Department is bringing against a development he and his father are building in New York.  The charge is discrimination in housing units, a violation of the Fair Housing Act.  Cohn countersued the Justice Department and managed to settle the affair without the Trumps admitting discrimination. Trump considers this well done and it begins a professional and personal friendship.

At around this point Cohn begins to teach Trump specific lessons about conducting conflicts with life in the fast lane. One he teaches him is to play the man, not the ball.  In other words, see what you can do to bring your opponent down on something outside the case.  But beyond that, Cohn teaches Trump three overarching rules, as pithy as Sun Tzu:

  1. Always be on the attack.

2. Never admit wrongdoing.

3. And always claim victory, even if you lose.

As Matt Tyrnauer, who made a documentary about Cohn said, Trump absorbed these lessons for both his life and career. (The Independent, October 11, 2024, story by Kevin Perry) Looking at the way Trump has run his presidential campaigns, it is difficult not to credit Cohn’s lessons for the manner in which they were conducted.  In fact, one could justifiably say that rule Number 3 resulted in the Insurrection.

In the dispute with the Justice Department,  Sherman clearly used too much dramatic license, going as far as Cohn using blackmail.  (As we have seen, Cohn was not above doing this but I could find no evidence he did it in this case.)  But Sherman navigates this Cohn/Trump relationship in a generally accurate  and pungent manner.  The third main character in the film is Trump’s deceased first wife Ivana.  And according to Sherman, she supplied much of the informational basis for some of rather unseemly parts of the film depicting Mr. Trump.

For instance, there is a scene showing her scanning a draft for a prenuptial agreement which read that if and when the couple broke up it would be “required… she return everything—cars, furs, rings—that Mr. Trump might have given her during their marriage.” (NY Times, June 20, 2016, article by Jonathan Mahler and Matt Giegenheimer). She was quite upset about this and Trump apologized, blaming it on Cohn.  But according to Sherman, it might have been even worse than that. Because the writer has said that the lawyer for Ivana was a friend of Cohn’s, who he arranged for her. In other words Cohn had covered both sides. (Entertainment Weekly, October 11, 2024, article by Mike Miller.)

Cohn then helped Trump do the deal that probably made his reputation and separated him from his father.  This was the purchase of the Commodore Hotel which Trump bought in partnership with the Hyatt hotel chain.  The film shows Cohn advising him on the tax abatements the city granted the purchasers.  These were quite extravagant, reportedly ultimately worth 360 million.  Especially since the city finances were in awful shape.

That success gave Trump the credibility to begin serious planning for his jewel in the crown, namely Trump Tower in New York City. As the film shows, Mayor Ed Koch (played by Ian Clark)  and the rising Manhattan real estate magnate did not like each other. Especially after a meeting they had over Trump’s proposal to again use tax abatements. And the film uses an actual insulting quote Trump made about the mayor.  (NY Times, 10/18/24, story by Ginia Bellafante) But this project was a smashing success and we see the opening of this multi -use, nearly 60 story building with Cohn in attendance. This was Trump at his apogee.

According to Sherman, Cohn advised Trump against what almost sunk his mushrooming real estate empire.  This was his decision to invest in what Trump thought would be the Las Vegas of the east, namely Atlantic City.  Cohn thought that Trump was too overleveraged there, the venue where he eventually bought three hotel casinos.  And, as depicted, this began a cooling of the relationship, even though Cohn was correct on this score. In fact, it was this investment that led to a string of bankruptcies for Trump: all three of those enterprises were in bankruptcy by 1992.  So much for the Vegas vision.

The film shows that Cohn asked Trump to help a close friend, who was in ill health, to a room at one of his buildings. Trump did so but ended up tossing him and sending Cohn the bill. Cohn has a confrontation over this with his former pupil on the street. This was really bad behavior on Trump’s part. Because many of the things Cohn did for Trump he either discounted or did not charge him at all.

Near the end of the film, Trump watches an ill Cohn on a TV interview.  He sympathizes with his old pal and gives him a gift of what was supposed to be Bulgari diamond cuff links.  Trump then holds a dinner party for Cohn on his birthday at Mar-a-Lago.  At this gathering, Ivana quietly tells Cohn that the cufflinks are not genuine, they are knockoffs. This is not exactly how it happened, but the gist of the story is accurate. And, in fact, Trump pulled this stunt more than once. (NY Post, 6/21/16, story by Kate Sheehy and Carl Campanile)

The film ends with Cohn’s death in 1986.   He denied he had AIDS until the end. He said he had liver cancer.  This was false and was apparently done to disguise his sexuality from beyond the grave.  What follows is a skillfully edited montage of Trump getting liposuction on his waist, and also surgery on his scalp in order to conceal his creeping baldness.  In a quite appropriate coda, Trump calls in a writer to his office.  The man is going to actually pen Trump’s runaway best-selling book The Art of the Deal. And Trump tells him some of the rules  he lives by, which clearly echo Cohn.  In retrospect, that liposuction/scalp surgery montage is to signify how Trump had his character altered under Cohn’s tutelage.  For me it worked metaphorically.  And in reality, Ivana said those things happened.

To fill in the personal side of the picture, it does show Trump cheating on his wife.  Although this does not appear to be with Marla Maples—which he actually did--but with two pick up girls. And it shows  a first meeting with Roger Stone, which is meant to signify the birth of his interest in political ambitions.  It also shows him treating his alcoholic brother Fred rather crassly. Something which he admittedly felt badly about after Fred died young.

The acting in the film is satisfactory.  This includes Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as Cohn and Martin Donovan as Fred Trump.  None of them is really outstanding, but none of them are below average either.  The one exception to this was Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump who is exceptional.

Let me conclude with the two main characters’ comments on each other.  This was Donald Trump about Cohn:

“Roy was the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed, long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.” ( NY Times, Tony Schwartz, 10/11/24)

After the two were estranged and Trump had basically severed the relationship, Cohn said about his former student, “Donald pisses ice water.” (ibid) This from the man who condemned the Rosenbergs to death.

That sums up the message of the film.