There were many seminal moments in the life of former President Trump, when the ground shifted beneath his feet and altered his trajectory. The Apprentice, director Ali Abbasi’s forthcoming Trump biopic starring Sebastian Stan as The Donald, is built around one such moment — a key figure, really, one who schooled Trump in the dark arts of media and politics, drilled into him a win-at-all-costs mentality, and then turned him loose upon the headline-obsessed New York City of the 1980s: The late Roy Cohn, a lawyer who represented mob bosses and who was also a chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare era.
Had Trump never found himself in Cohn’s orbit, he might have remained a nepo baby real estate developer, perhaps never escaping the shadow of his developer father. Abbasi’s The Apprentice — the first trailer for which dropped today, hours before the first 2024 presidential debate between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris — is as much a story of why that didn’t happen as it is an introduction to one of the most influential figures in Trump’s life who many Americans have probably never even heard of.
Portrayed here by Succession‘s Jeremy Strong as a gimlet-eyed Iago to Trump’s Othello, Cohn imparts a few simple, slash-and-burn rules to his brash mentee that Trump would go on to incorporate into not only his real estate career but eventually his successful run for the White House. “The first rule is: Attack, attack, attack.”
Also: The press wants — no, craves — hyperbole. “It’s gonna be the finest building in the city, the country,” Stan’s Trump tells someone on the phone at one point in the trailer, while riding in the back of a swanky car with Cohn, before adding one final superlative: “…the world!” Later on in the trailer, which you can check out below, an increasingly sure-footed Trump stands before an easel with designs on it: “There’s never been anything like it of this magnitude, this quality.”
And then there’s this chestnut, explained by The Apprentice‘s version of Cohn, that the real-life Trump continues to use to great effect: “Admit nothing. Deny everything.” Which, in turn, is also related to another and perhaps the most important Cohn principle: No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat.
Written by Vanity Fair scribe Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice from Briarcliff Entertainment is not some overly dense psychoanalysis of a complex, multi-layered persona. Judging from the first trailer, the movie looks to be an unflattering deconstruction of the Tao of Trump — as presented here, he’s all “id” and subtlety-free, this composite of Trump as a narcissistic rageaholic whose appetites and ambition are exactly what his detractors imagine them to be: Bound by nothing.
