Adam Boulton | Why The Apprentice, a new film about Donald Trump’s early years, may harm the former president’s 2024 White House chances

There are three rules for success in life: Attack, attack, attack. Admit nothing, deny everything. And always claim victory.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is sticking to them to this day.

The original advice is given to the young Trump by the notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn, as played by Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong, in a controversial new biopic which is opening in cinemas across the US this weekend, with just 25 days to go until election day.

The movie’s release amounts to an unwelcome October surprise for Trump’s campaign. He is just the latest former US leader to fall foul of big screen incarnation.

Dan Snyder, a close billionaire friend of the former president, originally helped fund the film’s production with the expectation that it would depict Trump positively.

After seeing a finished cut he spoke to his lawyers in an attempt to stop its distribution.

Trump’s own legal team issued a cease and desist notice to stop the “marketing, distribution, and publication” of the movie.

They were unsuccessful.

The Apprentice had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

It pulled off its New York premiere in Manhattan last week after a Kickstarter fundraiser was set up to help “promote and defend the acclaimed Trump biopic that corporate America is scared to show you”.

Now it is going on commercial release in the US and Europe. It is out in the UK on 18 October.

The film’s producers insist that it is “a fair and balanced portrait of the former president” based on fact, as stated at the start of the film.

It opens without comment, playing archive footage of Richard M Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” speech and his claim that he never personally profited from public office. The implied comparison with Trump is unmissable.

The film covers “Donnie” as he starts out in his father’s property business in the 1970s and 1980s – before his political career and his time as the star of the long-running The Apprentice reality TV show.

It ends as Trump commissions the ghostwriter for his 1987 bestseller, The Art Of The Deal, and undergoes surgery for liposuction and baldness.

The portrait of the future president is intimate. Sebastian Stan brilliantly mimics many of the gestures and mannerisms which have become familiar to a global audience.

Trump starts out as a soft, privileged, and highly ambitious young man.

He is shown going on to become a party to blackmail, corruption, attempts to swindle his siblings, and bankruptcy.

In a graphic scene, he rapes his first wife.

In her legal divorce deposition, Ivana did indeed accuse her husband of marital rape.

She recanted the claim years later insisting: “Donald and I are the best of friends and he would never rape me.”

Ivana, the mother of Don Jnr, Ivanka, and Eric Trump, died in 2022.

In this film, Trump is the apprentice tutored in corruption to win by Roy Cohn. Cohn persuades him that there is no such thing as “The truth”, only what you say it is.

Cohn was a well-known New York lawyer whose clients ranged from Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Andy Warhol to Mafia bosses.

Since his death in 1986, he has assumed almost legendary status in US literature as an evil manipulator.

A closet homosexual who died of complications from AIDS, Cohn is a central character in the award-winning drama Angels In America and other fiction and non-fiction works.

Cohn began his career as a fierce anti-Communist prosecutor who worked alongside Richard Nixon and US Senator Joe McCarthy, who led the discredited anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.

Cohn used all means to ensure that both Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, mother of two young children, went to the electric chair for spying.

At The Apprentice’s Manhattan after-party, Jeremy Strong told Vanity Fair: “Roy’s legacy is a legacy of shamelessness, mendacity, lies, dissimulation, brutality, and winning as the only moral measure.”

Strong is a method actor, best known as Kendall Roy in Succession, who likes to inhabit the parts he plays.

In Roy Cohn, he says he also found “a kind of guileless innocence and charm at the same time as he was a lethal, brutal, ruthless, savage, remorseless person”.

By the end of the film, Cohn is almost a pathetic character as Trump casts him off, partly in fear of his sickness, partly because of his advice “to slow down” making increasingly questionable “deals”.

Trump relents and throws a final birthday party for Cohn at Mar-a-Lago, spoilt by a thoroughly alienated Ivana telling him that the “solid gold” and diamond Trump cufflinks he’s been given are cheap fakes.

Meanwhile, the real estate tycoon completes his apprenticeship by stealing Cohn’s rules as his own for his book.

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Jeremy Strong, Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova turn in Oscar-worthy performances – although the Academy may not be in the mood to honour the film next spring if the man himself is voted back into the White House.

Whether friendly or hostile, presidential biopics typically do not do very well.

Neither Primary Colours in 1998 nor Reagan this year made back their production costs.

Primary Colours came out well into Bill Clinton’s second term, too late to damage his political career.

John Travolta’s portrayal of slippery Jack Stanton, a thinly disguised version of Clinton, and his “bimbo eruptions” did little for the president’s long-term reputation.

Dennis Quaid played President Ronald Reagan in a hagiography earlier this year.

It fizzled at the box office, was panned by critics, and was quickly pulled from cinemas. It has not been released in the UK.

Reagan died 20 years ago but Facebook still restricted online advertising of the film this year in case it was seen as election interference for the Republicans.

The most successful recent biopic was the satire Vice in which Christian Bale piled on the prosthetic pounds to impersonate Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice president.

This year the real Dick Cheney, a staunch Republican who also served Nixon, has endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris over his own party’s candidate.

His daughter, former US congresswoman Liz Cheney, is leading the campaign against him inside the party.

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Unlike those movies, The Apprentice is going live just when Americans are deciding whether or not to vote for Trump.

What impact it will have is uncertain. One audience member at the US premiere thought it could help Trump win because “Sebastian Stan is attractive”.

The film’s Iranian-Danish director Ali Abassi says “it’s fun to be riding on the back of the dragon”.

The scriptwriter Gabriel Sherman hopes the film “makes people sit in a quiet, dark theatre and look with their own eyes at the behaviour of the man that we might elect to be the next president”.

Donald Trump may hate the film and denounce it. But the boastful mega-egotist so painstakingly captured in The Apprentice will nevertheless be upset, one suspects, if it fails to do business “bigly” at the box office.