You probably didn’t see The Apprentice. No, not the Donald Trump reality show—you definitely caught an episode or two of that on NBC over its decade-plus run. But my compulsion to clarify that just underscores—despite two (admittedly long-shot) Oscar nominations, both for acting—that you probably did not see the 2024 film The Apprentice. It stars Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump, the titular apprentice, during his rise in the 1970s and ’80s—from rebuilding the Commodore Hotel to The Art of the Deal—under the mentorship of infamous lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong). It’s easy to attribute the film’s financial failure to psychological generalizations about audiences. In Jacobin, Eileen Jones “had to wonder who the audience was supposed to be for this film,” since “Trump supporters will never see it” and “the anti-Trump segment of the population, perhaps drawn to this highly unflattering portrayal, might not be able to bear a solid block of time spent watching the bane of their existences rise to personal wealth, power, and influence in 1980s New York City.”

There’s likely some truth to this. When I first heard about The Apprentice, my gut instinct was a Trump-fatigued eye roll. But there was a lot more at play as to why the film wasn’t widely seen. Despite distribution rights for most territories being purchased in short order, it took a long time to find a U.S. distributor, with Deadline reporting that it soon “became clear that major studios would steer clear” as “a return to the White House by Trump could create problems for the conglomerate” that distributed it. (Problems like the U.S. government actually enforcing antitrust laws, for instance.) Trump’s legal team sent a cease-and-desist to the filmmakers and threatened to sue. When the film did find a distributor in the form of Briarcliff Entertainment, the release was small, and the marketing budget was minimal: The Apprentice had zero TV spots. Apart from those award nominations, the industry has mostly sought to shut the film out of discussion: no other actor would agree to appear on Variety’s “Actors on Actors” series with Sebastian Stan, who stated, “we couldn’t get past the publicists or the people representing them because they were too afraid to talk about this movie.” It’s a case study in the chilling effect of consolidation in the corporate world, cult-of-personality fascism in the political world, and how they work together to censor without having it on the books as censorship. It would be outrageous for any piece of art, but it’s especially galling for a film as vital as this one. 

Directed by Denmark-based Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbasi from a script by journalist Gabriel Sherman in his screenwriting debut, The Apprentice constitutes a small cinematic miracle. It feels intimate yet epic in scope, gesturing towards what Trump is now and what he represents without ever, despite its October release, feeling like a political campaign ad. It’s a film about Trump that feels fresh ten years into having non-stop Trump content hooked directly to our veins. A film about Trump that is so rich in psychological detail but knows that “humanizing” him or Roy Cohn isn’t mutually exclusive with recognizing their almost unfathomable evil. It's the key to fathoming it. 

“In the time of turmoil, there’s this tendency to look inwards, to bury your head deep in the sand, look inside and hope for the best—hope for the best, hope for the storm to get away,” Abbasi told the audience at the Cannes film festival regarding the rising wave of fascism. “But the storm is not going to get away. The storm is coming. The worst times are coming.”

We hear The Apprentice before we see it: the names of production companies on-screen are punctuated by the sound of Richard Nixon’s voice assuring us he has never profited from public service. He continues speaking as grainy news footage of the press conference fills the screen, delivering his most famous line: “People have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook,” he says. “I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” In a matter of seconds, it drops us into the film’s period setting, invites interpretation of the film’s themes and characters, and establishes the film’s penchant for using authentic news footage or recreating the look and feel of grainy 1970s/’80s television: at some times we see Trump as a person would next to him, at others we see him—see New York—through the video cameras that become a ubiquitous part of celebrity culture. 

With the roar of a guitar, we see Donald Trump walking through the seedy, violent New York of the 1970s—street sex workers, police brutality, fire and brimstone—towards an exclusive club where he has been recently admitted as a member. Inside, he points out the rich and famous men around them to his obviously uninterested date, marking him out as an orbiter of the uber-wealthy—closer than any ordinary person but not truly one of them—who is both ambitious and socially oblivious. “Why are you so obsessed with these people?” she asks him. It echoes the opening scene of The Social Network, where Jesse Eisenberg-as-Mark Zuckerberg drones on and on about Harvard’s final clubs until his girlfriend breaks up with him. But whereas The Social Network portrays Zuckerberg as bitter, cruel, but intellectually brilliant, The Apprentice’s Trump is fundamentally empty. He wants to be rich—rich-rich, not working as a rent collector for his slumlord dad—but not with the desperate zeal that the word “want” might imply. He tells his date that “there’s a skill to be a billionaire,” but he also says, “It’s a talent. You have to be born with it. You have to have a certain gene.” 

The Apprentice isn’t about how Trump was made the way he is in his genes. It’s about him being built, piece by piece. Stan—best known for playing the Winter Soldier in the Marvel movies—goes through the kind of remarkable physical transformation that is often mistaken for good acting but in this case is backed up with the real thing. In a world where everyone has their own terrible Donald Trump impression, he becomes Trump: a slow transformation visually, verbally, in his essence, that embodies Trump’s own journey from relatively normal man—hair a normal blonde, skin the color someone’s skin might be, his speaking style more halting and less boastful—to the Trump we know today. 

The Dr. Frankenstein sewing him together is Roy Cohn. And Donald Trump, like Frankenstein’s creature, is at once his creator’s love object, an extension of himself and the harbinger of his destruction.

When Trump’s date gets up for a moment, he meets Cohn’s eye for the first time, staring at him intently from an exclusive-from-the-exclusive cordoned off table. Jeremy Strong, fresh off his role as Kendall Roy on Succession, plays Cohn as a malevolent, cold-blooded creature, his eyes intent and focused but his affect astonishingly flat. He’s deadpan-funny and truly sinister. It’s an extraordinary physical performance, conveying so much with the smallest gesture: he holds his head forward, like a turtle peering out of its shell, giving his nods the quality of a buoy bobbing in the ocean. 

His initial interest in Trump is as a hot piece of ass. Cohn was gay, something which was an open secret amongst his associates—he casually calls his boyfriend Russell “baby” and “sweetheart” in front of straight friends—but a tightly guarded secret from the public. He spews homophobic bile, even if the listener knows he’s gay, never acknowledging the dissonance. (Cohn was Jewish, and the same goes for antisemitism.) When he invites Trump to sit with him and the mafiosos he’s dining with, he calls Trump handsome and grips his thigh under the table. Cohn may be aware of Trump’s father—“Oh, you're Fred Trump's kid?”—but Trump is truly starstruck: “The Roy Cohn? From all the papers and everything?” Cohn, as his dinner guests are quick to point out, was responsible for the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. After that, he was an instrumental part in Joseph McCarthy’s anti-communist witch hunts. He’s been indicted plenty but, he boasts, never convicted. Trump sees in Cohn the opportunity he’s been waiting for. He’s his father’s favorite son—Fred Trump scorns Donald’s older brother Freddy, insisting that he’s an embarrassment to the family for becoming an airline pilot, and his cruelty surely contributes to Freddy’s alcoholism—but his father doesn’t have a vision for what Donald could be, could do.  

Illustration by John Biggs

Trump asks for Cohn to represent the family company, which is being sued for violating the Fair Housing Act by discriminating against Black tenants. Cohn agrees, telling Trump, “Sounds to me like they're discriminating against you… it should be called the Unfair Housing Act. It's your building. You can do whatever the hell you want.” He is so emphatic—or as emphatic as you can get without ever changing the tone of your voice—that Trump naturally believes they have a winning case. 

“Your case is a total dog,” Cohn scoffs. “Your leasing agents marked Black applications with a C. That C didn't stand for cotton candy, now did it?”

What Cohn was doing wasn’t sincerely arguing the merits of the case. He was following the rules he lives by, the ones he wants to pass down to Trump. Any sexual interest Cohn had in Trump dissipates in favor of something more meaningful. He somehow, for better or worse, loves Trump—almost like a father. The role Trump takes in his life is as close as he’ll get to having a son, someone to carry on his legacy. It’s surprisingly moving, even though the legacy he wants to pass on is being As Evil As Possible. He gripes about how pinko commie liberals are trying to destroy truth, justice, and the American way but is eager to pervert truth, justice, and the American way to stop them. He shows Trump the extensive recording equipment he uses to tape every conversation that happens in his house so that he has something on anyone who’s anyone. He tells Trump that despite what they told you in high school sports, you should play the man, not the ball, and then gets Trump a tax abatement to rebuild the derelict Commodore Hotel by threatening to out a city council official as gay. He explains that he had ex parte conversations with the judge in the Rosenbergs’ case, so he could ensure that Ethel, not just Julius, got the electric chair. He tells him to always let the phone ring twice. Cohn boils his philosophy down to three rules: 

• Attack, attack, attack
• Admit nothing, deny everything
• No matter how beaten you are, you claim victory and never admit defeat.

The connections to Trump’s later presidency and surrounding events are obvious, but the film doesn’t belabor the point. It organically contextualizes Trump within the rise of the American Right: Cohn has photos of himself with Nixon on his wall, and Roger Stone, the lobbyist, political fixer, convicted criminal and another Cohn acolyte, pops up throughout. The Apprentice is in part the story of how the U.S. got to where it is now, but that is just one element weaved into a detailed character study. It’s a combination that acknowledges Trump’s terrifying role in bringing American fascism to power while avoiding the great man theory of history which would present Trump as a unique aberration who exists outside of the social and political context that created him. 

Cohn’s three rules, he assures Trump, are how you become a winner. Trump rarely questions the ethics of all this, or at least, easily buys Cohn’s argument that it’s all for the good of America, “the biggest client.” Mostly, he just soaks it all in, repeats it back, like following Cohn can be the thing to fill the empty space inside him. 

Another candidate to fill his emptiness is Ivana (Maria Bakalova, who played Borat’s daughter in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm). She’s a smokeshow Czech model who plans to become an interior designer, and Trump seems genuinely impressed and encouraging of her ambition in her own right, that she wants to be more than a trophy wife. His wooing of her is sincerely romantic, untouched by the macho bullshit you might expect. Boyishly charming and lovesick, he fills her apartment with flowers. Before they get married, she’s upset at the prenup that Cohn draws up: when Trump chases after her, their conversation is one part love declaration, one part business negotiation, but as played by Stan and Bakalova, it’s uncynical salted caramel. Somehow Ivana haggling him up from $50,000 to $100,000 sounds like I love you. 

In a film where Trump seems determined to feel as little as possible—afraid of what might happen if he does—this early part of his relationship with Ivana is the only time where he seems really happy. All of it curdles and evaporates. The Apprentice takes a lot of influence from Brian De Palma’s Scarface, and nowhere more so than in Trump and Ivana’s relationship. The thrill seems to be in the chase, and once married, he quickly hates her. She works on the interior designs for Trump Tower, and he bitterly says that he feels like he’s married to a business partner. He tells Cohn that he’s no longer attracted to her, but at least he got her to get breast implants, and then he tells Ivana that he’s not attracted to her because her boobs are fake. He buries himself in work—expanding too quickly, over his head in debt to build casinos in Atlantic City—and drugs. (Trump pops diet pills—speed—like vitamins, telling Cohn that he doesn’t need to sleep anymore. “Are you sure that's a good thing?” Cohn asks.) 

He hates Ivana for seeing what no one can be allowed to see. His brother Freddy is spiraling. He comes to Donald—his once clean-cut look marred by a week’s stubble, eyes red and wet—and tells him things are getting scary. After years of chronic drinking, he is, at last, asking for help. Ivana offers to have the guest room made up, and Trump lies that actually her family is coming to visit, so there’s no room at the inn. He presses some cash into Freddy’s hand and tells him to stay in a hotel for a while. The next time Trump gets a call from his mother, Freddy is dead. 

After the funeral, we see Trump scrubbing his hands in his gaudy bathroom. But no matter how long he washes his hands, he can’t get the blood off them. He lies in bed with Ivana, and for the only time in the film, cries. He insists that he’s fine. “You don’t need to be fine,” Ivana tells him, making space for him to break down, willing to offer whatever comfort she can. 

“Don’t come near me,” Trump says, “Please stop looking at me and stop touching me.” There’s a bleak humor to it, how obviously upset Trump is and how studiously he’s ignoring his own guilt and sadness. As if the tears are something happening to him, unrelated to who he is or how he feels. He hates Ivana for seeing right through him. This is the nucleus of everything he grows to hate about her. She knows his vulnerability, and he surely makes a silent vow that she will be the last one who does. 

The film includes Trump’s rape of Ivana, as described by Ivana Trump in a deposition during their divorce. (She later recanted but is also subject to a gag order that stops her speaking about Trump without his permission). It is an act of malice, a punishment. It is all the more horrific because we once saw him fill her apartment with flowers. 

The only person left to shed is Cohn. His betrayal of Cohn, the only person who still, for some reason, loves him, is the final sacrifice of his own soul. If it once seemed like Trump had made a Faustian bargain, it turns out that Cohn isn’t the devil, but just a mortal man: no less evil, but not supernaturally powerful. “The Roy Cohn of The Apprentice is only a man,” Mark Asch writes for MUBI Notebook. “[B]ut the real Roy Cohn was a metaphor, a myth.” But every real person, no matter how much larger than life, is flesh and blood: the real Roy Cohn was a metaphor, a myth, and only a man. In The Apprentice, Cohn asks Trump to put up his boyfriend, who’s sick, at one of his hotels as a favor. But when Trump finds out it’s AIDS, he throws him out and sends Cohn the bill. He refuses Cohn’s calls and won’t meet him when he shows up at his office. Eventually Cohn confronts him on the street. “I made you. Don't you forget that,” he says. 

“Pretty sure I made myself,” Trump counters. Of all Trump’s absurd self-aggrandizements, this one rings the falsest. 

Germophobic, homophobic, and prone to bizarre medical theories—he claims that exercise is bad for you because the human body is like a battery, with a fixed, finite amount of energy—Trump’s hostility towards AIDS sufferers seems like it might be rooted in pure ignorance. He asks a doctor about AIDS, if you can get it if someone with AIDS breathes on you or touches you, and shortly after, invites Cohn for a stay in Mar-a-Lago. It seems like he’s trying to make up for his cruelty, having seen Cohn sick as a dog (with what, to the end, he insists is liver cancer) in a TV interview. As he pushes Cohn’s interview through the estate, he presents him with a birthday present: diamond cufflinks. He points to the engraving: “Look what it says,” his voice soft and warm. 

It says “Trump.”

That would be humiliating and tone-deaf enough. But as he shows them to Ivana at dinner that night —sitting on one end of a long, crowded table with Trump on the far end—she tells Cohn, reluctantly but like it’s important for him to hear, “this is cheap pewter. The stone is zirconia. They're fake.” As Cohn looks at Trump, wrapped up in a conversation with someone else, she adds, “Donald has no shame.” The way Cohn’s face falls is microscopic, but for a man as perversely stone-faced as he, it hits like a ton of bricks. When Trump has his birthday cake brought out, he bursts into tears and excuses himself. It’s the last we see of him. 

Cohn’s funeral is intercut with two other sequences, creating the sense of them happening simultaneously. One is of Trump’s Florida home being steam-cleaned, disinfecting any surface Cohn may have touched, anywhere he may have breathed—regardless of whether Trump sincerely thought AIDS could be transmitted that way, it plays unwittingly or not like one last fuck you. The other sequence is Trump going under the knife, getting liposuction (he’s been steadily putting on weight throughout the film, and switching from Coke to Diet Coke doesn’t seem to have halted it any) and a scalp reduction (to get rid of his bald spot). A boy soprano singing “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee” at Cohn’s funeral is the eerie soundtrack to Trump’s fat deposits being sucked through a tube and his scalp being stapled shut. 

Roy Cohn dies. But he lives on, a cursed half-life. Trump meets with Tony Schwartz to ask him to ghostwrite a book. He doesn’t want to talk to him about his life, though: his childhood growing up in Queens, his parents, his siblings. Instead, he tells him the rules that he follows. One: attack, attack, attack. Two: deny everything, admit nothing. Three: never admit defeat, always claim victory. They’re his rules now. He came up with them. He wants to exist outside of history, to have been born fully formed, but all there is to him is what others have given him. This is Cohn’s legacy, but he’s been written out of it. Trump is like a zombie Roy Cohn, repeating the words without knowing what they mean. Spreading Cohn’s three-point plan for supervillainy to compensate for the emptiness inside him. 

Schwartz asks how Trump came upon these rules, and he tells him, “I'm a big believer in natural ability, and a lot of that is genetics. You have to be born with it, you know?” 

Trump is such a strange figure that it’s easy to treat him like a cartoon. This was a key part of his rise to power: he could be seen as a buffoon, not dangerous but hilarious, and a ratings bonanza. The easiest reaction to this is to treat him as a secular Satan, come to earth to bring hell upon minorities and immigrants. But watching The Apprentice, I felt, deep in my bones, that he was a human being. But it didn’t make him seem less evil; it made his evil all the more terrifying. There’s a strange kind of comfort in imagining that evil is fundamentally alien. But the horror of evil is that it’s human.