The Seeds Of Chaos: Biopic Shows Legal Manipulator Influencing Future President — for the Worse
DIRECTED BY ALI ABBASI/2024
As the U.S. Department of Justice in 2017 looked into whether Donald Trump’s campaign worked with Russian authorities to tilt the previous year’s election in his favor, the president felt the need to make sure someone had his back.
He wanted U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions to continue leading the investigation. Trump “had expected his top law enforcement official to safeguard him the way he believed Robert F. Kennedy as attorney general had done for his brother John F. Kennedy and Eric H. Holder Jr. had for Barack Obama,” according to a Jan. 4, 2018, article in The New York Times.
But Sessions had served a role in Trump’s campaign and, as a U.S. senator, had met with Russian officials. Succumbing to mounting public pressure to a conflict of interest, he announced he would recuse himself from the federal probe.
This infuriated Trump. At one point he screamed: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Trump longed for the days when Roy Cohn, his personal attorney in the 1970s and 1980s, would stop at nothing to defend him. Cohn earned a reputation as a no holds barred lawyer who ignored professional ethics in following a simple formula: Win at any cost!
Cohn began representing Trump as well as the Trump Organization, his father’s real estate development company. The experienced power broker and notorious political icon saw something in this brash upstart and took him under his wing. He admired Trump’s bravado and his penchant for taking risks, but he knew that the young businessman needed his New York City connections to reach his goals.
So Cohn imparted his rules for success to Trump: “Attack, attack, attack”; “Admit nothing; Deny everything”; and “Always claim victory.” To say that Trump committed these ideas to heart is an understatement.
The Apprentice, which opened Oct. 11, examines the Cohn/Trump relationship as a way of understanding where the future president picked up some of his dubious characteristics. Directed by Ali Abbasi and written by Gabriel Sherman, the movie features superb performances by Jeremy Strong as Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Trump.
The film cleverly takes its title from the long-running reality television program in which Trump starred on NBC. Only this time, Trump serves as the apprentice under Cohn’s tutelage rather than some young go-getter soaking up Trump’s business acumen.
***SPOILER ALERT: This review discusses key aspects of this film.***
The movie opens in 1973 as the Trump Organization faces a federal complaint that it’s discriminating against Black tenants in its apartment complex. At a restaurant, Trump asks Cohn to consider taking the firm on as a client in this matter.
The Apprentice captures how far Trump comes within his father’s company and as a New York City bigwig. One scene shows Trump banging on apartment doors to collect overdue rent money. While he’s ambitious, the young man from Queens has a lot to learn about how things operate in the real world.
Fred Trump, the future president’s domineering father, runs the company — and his household — with an iron fist. He belittles his eldest son, Fred Jr., at the dinner table for becoming an airline pilot rather than entering the family business. He also criticizes some of Donald’s business decisions in a condescending manner.
Cohn urges Trump to adopt a “take no prisoners” attitude in every aspect of life. The protégé sees how the mentor uses his many connections to get what he wants. Cohn prefers to work behind the scenes to motivate those with authority to do his bidding.
This is a skill Cohn developed early in his legal career. As an assistant U.S. attorney, he played a major role in the prosecution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg; they were convicted of passing U.S. secrets pertaining to the atomic bomb to the Russians and sentenced to death. Cohn then becomes the chief counsel for U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy in their quest to root out communists, ushering in the era of McCarthyism.
Cohn bullies and manipulates adversaries in defense of his clients. He exhibits no remorse over trampling on the rights of others while doing so.
For his part, Trump acts on his instincts and on what Cohn is imparting to him. He wants to help revive New York City with innovative developments. The Big Apple is in dire straits financially, and Trump believes that creating high-end hotels and residential complexes will spur new growth.
For his first project, he works with the Hyatt hotel chain to renovate the Commodore Hotel. This results in the opening of the Hyatt Grand Central New York in 1980.
Then came the crown jewel of this up-and-coming developer: Trump Tower. The office, residential and retail facility opened in 1983 and continues to serve as the headquarters of the Trump Organization.
Many influential people took notice of Trump while he made his mark in the city. One of them was his first wife, Ivana, a Czechoslovakian immigrant embarking on a modeling career (portrayed by Maria Bakalova).
As Trump absorbs what Cohn is offering, he sees the many contradictions with which his attorney wrestles.
Cohn remains a registered Democrat but supports Republicans for public office. Given his participation in the trial of the Rosenbergs and opposition to communism, Cohn has become a hero among conservatives. He also declares that he’s willing to fight the establishment in any cause yet lives very well off his links to those in power.
During the 1950s, Cohn investigated government employees suspected of being homosexuals, which led to the dismissal of many of them from their public sector positions. This presents the most significant inner conflict Cohn endures. He is a gay man who frequently has sex with other men, but he adamantly denies his sexual orientation every time he’s asked about it.
Cohn’s allies ignore his hypocrisy because he delivers results. But when his lifestyle and its consequences become too controversial, many of his friends turn their back on him when he needs them the most.
The Apprentice charts how Trump put his attorney’s teachings into practice and became a major force in New York City. And as Cohn was dying from AIDS in 1986, Trump found he could afford to join others in casting Cohn aside. Given the prevalence of bigotry against gays and lesbians then, they didn’t want to associate with someone suffering from AIDS.
Unfortunately for Cohn, Trump has adopted too many of his atrocious qualities. Cohn has been described by many critics over the years as “evil,” and by the end of his life he felt the sting of evil employed against him.
It’s worth recalling what U.S. Army Capt. Gustave Gilbert said about this human trait. Gilbert served as the psychologist who observed and interviewed German defendants during the war crimes trials in Nuremberg following World War II, and he outlined “evil” this way:
“In my work with the defendants, I was searching for the nature of evil and I now think I have come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants, a genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow men. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”
Cohn often exhibited an appalling lack of empathy for anyone who didn’t serve his immediate needs. When his friends abandoned him in the last months of his life, it must have hurt him deeply. But with Trump, he realized that he encouraged his protégé to display this attitude — much to Cohn’s detriment.
This is where The Apprentice excels. Abbasi said his film was designed to probe the characters of Cohn and Trump, and he succeeded in his goal.
Strong and Stan provide masterful performances in their roles. It would have been easy for Stan to satirize Trump as others have, but he wisely resisted the temptation. As an actor, he focused on accurately portraying Trump’s personality during this period of his life rather than merely impersonating him.
One drawback of the movie is its use of a scene involving sexual violence. In a deposition taken during their divorce proceedings, Ivana Trump accused her husband of raping her. But a few years later, she qualified her use of such rhetoric with this statement:
“[O]n one occasion during 1989, Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”
Trump threatened legal action against the film, which delayed its release. The scene depicting him raping his wife is one aspect to which he objects.
The reported incident is widely disputed and should not have been included in the movie — its authenticity is not known and unverifiable. While many women have accused Trump of sexual assault, we cannot know for sure what took place in this instance. Adding it to the film only strengthens criticisms of the project from Trump and his supporters due to its questionable yet volatile nature.
But The Apprentice overall does a terrific job of chronicling how Cohn transferred his attack dog skills to his client. As a candidate for public office, Trump has shown himself to be self-obsessed and lacking the ability to distinguish between truth and fantasy. These aren’t good qualities to possess if you want to be president.
So we now see how hazardous this all has been for our democratic system. In the end, we’re left to wonder how this chaotic political saga would have turned out had Trump sought more principled legal advice.