Is Donald Trump a singular political genius? Or a useful idiot steered by savvier acolytes?
In the immediate aftermath of his 2016 victory, observers careered between portraying Trump as an underestimated mastermind with a unique, innate understanding of America’s heartland or as a mere celebrity mouthpiece for Steve Bannon and other Machiavellian strategists. As his subsequent fortunes have waxed and waned, a more nuanced picture of a semi-agential actor has emerged, simultaneously influential and influenced.
He clearly has some canny populist instincts that chime with many middle-American anxieties and predilections. But these intuitions are finessed and channelled into action by a revolving cast of supporting actors, from Bannon to Laura Loomer. These advisers matter—a lot. One of the hottest topics on the 2024 campaign trail is whom he is listening to, and the extent to which he is influenced by broader ideological agendas, such as the Heritage Foundation’s infamous Project 2025.
It is amid such speculation that Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice premieres, a film especially interested in Trump’s mentors and influences. By going back to the 1970s and 1980s—a time when the young Donald, played with clever understatement by Sebastian Stan, was less self-confident and more obviously impressionable—the porous boundaries and permeability of the Trump phenomenon are brought into sharper relief. Already reverent of power and wealth, but shorn of his later braggadocio, we encounter Trump in a moment of almost unrecognisable vulnerability, searching for someone to teach him the ropes and propel him into the cloistered elite of a decaying New York.
If Trump, here, is the apprentice, who is the master? Abbasi answers straightforwardly: Roy Cohn, played brilliantly by Jeremy Strong. The film is just as much a study of Cohn as of Trump. The former attorney to Senator Joseph McCarthy takes the young Donald under his wing and imparts three prophetic rules: “Attack, attack, attack”; “Admit nothing, deny everything”; and “Always claim victory”. His tactics range from PR bluster to outright corruption. Trump soon mimics his mentor, from turns of phrase to excessive fake tan, zero-sum patriotism and ambivalence towards his wife. Trump is, for a time, effectively Cohn Junior, until Aids unravels his closeted mentor’s health.
Some critics, such as the Guardian’s Emma Brockes, have asked whether an excessive focus on the relationship with Cohn obscures other influences, particularly Donald’s father Fred Trump, whose imprint was perhaps most noticeable earlier in his life. In the film, Fred is ageing, forgetful, suspicious of Cohn and increasingly out of touch. Donald does fear Fred, basks in his approval, then mourns his death desperately, yet he remains a minor character in The Apprentice, as Cohn supplants him as a father figure to the young Donald.
This could lead some viewers to underappreciate how central Fred was to his progeny’s success, including his financial contributions. Brockes points readers to the new book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success by New York Times journalists Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, which thoroughly investigates the privileges and traumas handed down from father to son.
But a single film can only do so much. It is understandable why writer Gabriel Sherman chose this period of Trump’s life, ripe as it is with narrative momentum and formative moments for the subject—not to mention giving Strong a platform for the upcoming awards season. The focus on Cohn also has more relevance to current events: we’re all influenced by our parents, but few have attracted and been moulded by borderline crooks and sociopaths the way the Donald has.
Another, less remarked upon limitation of focusing on the Trump-Cohn relationship is that it may underplay the role of broader American culture in Trump’s rise. To what extent, we might ask, was the nation itself complicit? Were the American public, the media, and its cultural and business establishments also the masters to the fledgling demagogue’s apprenticeship?
This is an intermittent preoccupation of the “villain origin story” genre—in which the New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast convincingly argues this film sits, alongside cartoonish titles such as Wicked, Cruella and Maleficent. Is there a reason to humanise and/or contextualise a villain? And to what end, asks a sceptical Naomi Fry on Critics at Large? If there is such an end, in my view it lies in dramatising questions of complicity—for protagonists, power structures and the audience. Who were the villain’s handmaidens or, indeed, his business partners?
This question was memorably posed by Todd Phillips’s Joker—asking, did we put that scar on the villain’s face?—to the extent it was accused of diminishing the agency and culpability of violent incels out in the real world. The troubled clown Arthur Fleck is repeatedly failed by social services and bureaucracy, hastening his descent into crime and chaos. HBO’s current drama The Penguin invokes adjacent themes, with Colin Farrell’s middling gangster Oz Cobb monologuing about how the crumbling of the American dream justifies dog-eat-dog ruthlessness. New York (or its fictional incarnation, Gotham), a city by turns associated with decay and triumph, seems a particularly fruitful setting for such stories. Villains don’t just spring from the sewers, these films suggest; they are a result of broken power structures and the corrupt leaders and comfortable bystanders who enable them.
The Apprentice doesn’t grapple so directly with societal complicity in its villain’s ascent; it is, first and foremost, a character drama. But allusions peak through the facade of marble floors and gold ceilings. Between-scene montages show exorbitant wealth, police brutality and racial division. Meanwhile, newsreels of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan are deployed primarily to show how Trump imbibed the conservative politics of his heyday, but they also remind us that Reagan was very popular—all the more so for pedalling proto-Trumpian sentiment. “Make America great again” was tried and tested long before Trump descended those golden escalators in 2015.
The film returns to Trump’s influences in its final scene, where he is talking to Tony Schwartz, ghost writer of Trump: The Art of the Deal. When asked for his rules for success, Trump repeats Cohn’s three rules in his own words, then gazes out the window, saying he has an “instinct” for all this, as if he intuited this worldview. He seemingly believes his own guff. He is wilfully blind to having taken his rules from Cohn. And, we might also say, from the culture that formed him.
But some in the audience might also succumb to a convenient amnesia, particularly those in America who lived through these times and didn’t ask too many questions. They too formed Trump; his and Cohn’s “rules” were simply pithy articulations of the “greed is good” mantra, which was tacitly and sometimes openly celebrated in the era between stagflation in the 1970s and the global financial crisis, and which has been depicted memorably by Tom Wolfe, Oliver Stone, Martin Scorsese and Michael Lewis.
Trump’s failure to evolve and the calcification of his prejudices are particularly stark. But he was, in essence, an apprentice of the American enterprise.
