Michelle Goldberg

The Trump movie The Apprentice likely isn’t being censored

On Friday morning, readers of the New York Times were presented with a foreboding headline: “The Chilling Reason You May Never See the New Trump Movie.” For the unfamiliar, the film in question, The Apprentice, is a drama/thriller about the relationship between Roy Cohn and a younger Donald Trump as he pursues glamour and riches in 1970s New York, becoming progressively amoral and self-obsessed in the process. Succession’s Jeremy Strong plays Cohn, Sebastian Stan plays Donald and the film’s most controversial scene involves the now former president raping his first wife, Ivana. (She accused him of “violating” her in her 1989 divorce deposition, only to recant this in 2015.

the apprentice

Michelle Goldberg and the art of the Big Lie

Lies come in all shapes and sizes, colors, odors, textures and tastes. Some are only little white lies, but more often the accompanying adjective suggests something unpleasant. Damnable lies used to be the most condemned, but today the foulest of all perfidious, incarnadine, silken and sulfurous lies are Big Lies. Thus when New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wants to reassure progressive voters that they can ignore the story about a ninth-grade girl who was raped (i.e. forcibly sodomized) in a girl’s restroom in a Loudoun County, Virginia school, she serves up her diversion under the title “The Right’s Big Lie About a Sexual Assault in Virginia.

big lie