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This article contains spoilers for The Apprentice.
Before we ever see Sebastian Stan in a slicked back blond wig and long red tie, Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice reveals its hand by focusing on an entirely different Republican president—and the only other who was seriously threatened with impeachment. In infamous archival footage, a sweaty and defensive Richard Nixon stands behind a lectern marked by the presidential seal while denying, denying, and denying he did anything improper regarding the Watergate break-in. Nestled in amongst his most immortalized defense—“I am not a crook”—Nixon also said something especially salient to Abbasi’s new film. “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook,” Nixon stammered. He then added “I’ve earned everything I’ve got.”
One need not be a presidential scholar to pick up on the irony of this proclamation from the son of Quakers. While little Dicky was raised on a lemon ranch, The Apprentice begins with the poison of its portrait practically dripping off the frame. When we meet young Donald Trump, he is a man strutting around New York City to “Street Man,” acting like he owns every building he enters, even though they mostly belong to his father Fred Trump (Martin Donovan). The Apprentice wants you to take stock in the full dimensions of his origins as the son of a rich man, albeit hardly an elitist. Fred Trump was an outer-borough real estate tyrant from Queens, and in the early scenes of the new film, we take notice of the ill-fitting, shabby nature of young Donald’s suits as he drives from slum to slum, picking up his father’s rent checks.
The man who would become President of the United States already has the ego and want in these scenes that would define a lifetime of bottomless appetites, but he doesn’t yet have the finesse to be anything more than the product of his father’s oppressive idea of parenting. (The few scenes we see of Donald’s home life with his other siblings suggest love, like everything else in the Trump household, is transactional.) He doesn’t have the guidebook to become anything more than a boorish hustler.
Hence the movie’s real central father-and-son relationship, as well as the one from which The Apprentice derives its title. While the new film is also named after the tacky 2000s reality TV series that gave Trump his national fanbase, Abbasi and screenwriter Gabriel Sherman really focus on Trump’s political and social nurturing beneath the wing of Roy Cohn, a painfully still-relevant ghost of American conservatism’s past.
Stan is excellent at providing enough texture and even flickering glimmers of pathos in his Trump performance to avoid becoming total caricature. One might even feel moments of sympathy for how Donald is treated by his father, or how he watches with concern (at least at first) his brother’s descent into alcoholism. Still, the performance of the movie belongs to Jeremy Strong as Cohn. After years of playing Kendall Roy on Succession as a collection of neuroses weakly attempting to emulate a Rupert Murdoch-like monstrousness in his father, Strong is liberated to be as ruthless and brutal as Murdoch could ever dream.
In fact, Murdoch was a contemporary of the real Roy Cohn, attending the same parties, and in The Apprentice we see Strong’s pugnacious lawyer act as the gatekeeper who introduces Trump to the conservative media mogul, as well as gives Trump the sound advice that if he wants his name in The New York Post, he needs to get on Murdoch’s good side.
It is moments like that sprinkled throughout The Apprentice which reveal the movie’s true aim. As with the naked comparison to Nixon—a disgraced Republican president who eventually had the shame to admit defeat when caught in a cover-up of criminality—with a future POTUS who still cannot admit he lost an election, The Apprentice is as much about a festering rot growing on the backside of American conservatism in the 20th century. In this context, it sees Trump not so much as a bizarre and dangerous anomaly in American life, but as a culmination of a political nastiness that has been there for at least a century—even if by the end of the film, Trump becomes a figurative traitor to even those values.
This aspect comes back to the Cohn of it all. As hinted at throughout the movie, Cohn is one of the most notorious figures in mid-20th American conservatism, not least of all because he was technically registered as a Democrat when he entered public life as an assistant U.S. attorney. Strong’s version of the man boasts more than once about his early career notoriety too when, at only age 24, he became one of the most influential prosecutors in the espionage trials of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were an American couple who operated as spies for the Soviet Union in the 1940s. Remember Klaus Fuchs in last year’s Oppenheimer? He was the German scientist discovered to be stealing secrets from the Manhattan Project for the Soviet Union. Well, the Rosenbergs worked with him among others in getting nuclear weapons designs to the Russians.
Cohn not only helped secure their convictions, but as he later bragged in his own autobiography, he illegally met outside of court with the judge overseeing the trial, and without the presence or knowledge of the Rosenbergs’ lawyer, where he pressured the judge into sentencing both husband and wife to death in the electric chair. In The Apprentice, Strong’s Cohn boasts that the judge was waffling on Ethel, feeling a pang of guilt about sending a young mother to Ol’ Sparky. But Cohn said he didn’t care, in fact, he tells Trump again and again that his greatest client as a lawyer is “America.” If you betray her, you’re dead to him.
Stan’s Trump seems to struggle with understanding Cohn’s fanaticism on this point, but he takes all of Cohn’s other lessons much more eagerly to heart. As the film reminds viewers, it is Cohn who taught Trump the three life lessons that would define his public persona forever-after. In Cohn’s zero-sum definition of winning, you must: 1) attack, attack, attack; 2) deny, deny, deny any and all criticism; and 3) always claim victory, even in defeat.
The film also shows Cohn teaching Donald how to use extralegal methods of manipulation, including blackmail, countersuit intimidation, and outright lying about your enemies. Whether or not every single incident of legal peril in the movie happened, it’s true that Cohn groomed Trump as an heir of his political philosophy with the three above tenets Trump later attempted to claim total credit for in his ghostwritten memoir, The Art of the Deal.
And the most spooky thing about The Apprentice is how it couches these lessons into a larger narrative of American conservative malpractice. While viewers are only given a hint of Cohn’s bullying style and unethical bragging, we get a real flavor of a man who famously quipped about his own parties, “If you’re not indicted, you’re not invited.” Like Trump, Roy Cohn did not operate on an island. In fact, the reason he wound up working almost entirely in private life as a New York courtroom brawler is because around the same time he sent Ethel Rosenberg to the chair, he also got deeply in bed with one of the most disgraced American politicians of the last hundred years: Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
The most Red Baiting of the Republican Red Baiters, McCarthy’s politics of fear-mongering, scapegoating, and visceral disgust for public servants (or “the deep state”) sound eerily familiar again these days. McCarthy earned his black mark in history by becoming part of the noun “McCarthyism” (shorthand for conspiratorial witch hunts) beginning in 1950 when he gave a speech in West Virginia alleging there were 205 “card-carrying members” of the Communist Party in the U.S. State Department. He failed to substantiate the claims then or ever, but he claimed at the time he “had a list” that he’d later produce. He never did, and his secretary eventually admitted he “just made it up.”
Nonetheless, he personally authored a dark chapter in American life, and eventually with Cohn acting as McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Together they inspected potential communists in the government, academia, and the media. They never proved anyone was actually a communist, however they ruined hundreds if not thousands of lives and careers by creating just the taint of investigation.
This included McCarthy and Cohn attempting to purge the government of any closeted gay men, because they claimed the USSR was using government employees’ homosexuality to coerce them into acts of treason and espionage. This claim was never proven, but their engineered “Lavender Scare” led to humiliated and ruined men committing suicide.
The gross irony of this likewise appears in its own way in The Apprentice. While his Red and Lavender Scare tactics in the 1950s are barely discussed, we see Jeremy Strong’s Cohn still playing in that same kind of mud when he blackmails one of Trump’s political enemies with photos of the married politician having gay sex. All the while Trump, and the viewer, know that Cohn is himself gay, as proven in an earlier scene when Trump walks in on the attorney having a men-only orgy upstairs during one of his parties.
Cohn, in fact, died of AIDS but went to his grave insisting he was “not a homosexual” nor that he suffered from anything other than liver cancer. The fact that this closeted gay man used other gay men’s “perversions” as a tool of control and destruction, reveals much about Cohn’s self-loathing and total absence of conscience. It also speaks to the political continuum he was on, with McCarthy as his own mentor, and with Trump now as his own protégé.
All are part of the larger architecture on the American right. Even after McCarthyism fell out of favor, the John Birch Society continued the disgraced senator’s anti-communist crusade and became even more conspiratorial, with founder Robert W. Welch Jr. claiming Republican leader and war hero, President Dwight D. Eisenhower, was secretly a Soviet agent. Such political grandstanding was toxic to the mainstream Republican Party, then, and it caused the John Birch Society to begin hiding its membership… but that kind of thinking obviously never went away.
The Apprentice reminds us all that Trump inherited the politics of aggression and deception from Cohn, who presumably would’ve been ecstatic to know his student would one day become president. And yet, as the movie only begins to tease, in his final years Cohn started to realize just how hollow Trump really was.
In the film, this is dramatized when Cohn confronts Donald late in the movie. By this point, even if Cohn is in denial about having AIDS, everyone else knows, and Trump has thrown out Cohn’s longtime boyfriend from one of his hotels after discovering the man is dying of HIV. Cohn opened the keys of New York society, at least among the shameless and crude, to Donald. And Trump won’t even let Cohn touch his arm, in fear of catching disease.
This scene echoes Cohn’s final assessment of the man who now lived in his beloved tower above Central Park South: “Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn said a year before his death in 1986.
In The Apprentice, they somewhat made up when Donald invited his former mentor to the newly purchased Mar-a-Lago, but at this point Cohn is only seen as a mirror or ornament reflecting Donald’s own self-perceived greatness. Tellingly, the also now fairly unloved (first) wife of Trump, Ivana (Maria Bakalova), sits alongside Cohn as far as possible from Donald himself. They’re no longer in favor with the court. At the beginning of the movie, he pursued both with great passion, but only because he wanted something from each of them (social status or sex). Now they’re used up and on their way out, quite literally in Cohn’s increasingly sick frailty.
During the movie, both men speak glowingly about loyalty, and in Cohn’s case he seems to mean it as he goes out of his way to help Trump out of his self-made jams without asking for a paycheck. He also never betrayed his own twisted view of loyalty to America. Yet for Trump, loyalty only flows one way, which appears to be the dawning horror of Cohn’s last scene in the movie.
In 2019, the real Cohn’s cousin, David L. Marcus, reflected in Politico the bitter irony of Cohn’s protégé becoming both POTUS and a useful tool for Russian President Vladimir Putin: “My cousin Roy Marcus Cohn—counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy, consigliere to Mafia bosses, mentor to Donald Trump—had almost no principles. He smeared Jews even though he was Jewish. He tarred Democrats even though he was a Democrat. He persecuted gay people even though he was gay. Yet throughout his life, he held fast to one certainty: Russia and America were enemies. Roy often told me the Kremlin blamed the U.S. for Russia’s failure to prosper, so Russian leaders were bent on destroying our democracy.
“If Roy had lived another 30 years, I’m sure he’d be pleased to learn that his protégé was elected president. But I am equally sure Roy would be appalled by Trump’s obsequious devotion to ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin. In his nasal tone, Roy would warn that Putin follows the Soviet playbook by interfering with elections in Western Europe; invading sovereign nations such as Ukraine; and assassinating dissidents and journalists.”
Even as the apprentice, Trump has proven that while Cohn’s “number one client” was America, the only one that matters to Trump is… Trump.
The Apprentice is playing in theaters now.
The post The Apprentice Ties Donald Trump to an Ancient Rot in the American Right appeared first on Den of Geek.
