Roy Cohn

The Apprentice is a dramatised biopic of Donald Trump, covering his early business years. He has called the film ‘FAKE and CLASSLESS’ and ‘garbage’ – but he wishes it well. I’m pulling your leg. ‘It will hopefully “bomb”,’ he has said. He hasn’t seen it, as far as anyone knows – I wish I could review films without seeing them; so time-saving – but even so, the writer, Gabriel Sherman, is ‘a lowlife and talentless hack’. If Trump had not trashed the film, you could say it had failed in what it was trying to reveal, which is: why does he behave this way? Where does his attacking mindset come from? It’s an origin story, if you like, and I was gripped throughout. It’s brilliantly acted and conceived, and it takes its subject seriously.

The news that Ali Abbasi’s Donald Trump drama The Apprentice has flopped in its first weekend at the US box office, taking in a mere $1.6 million from 1,740 locations across the country, may not be as surprising as liberal critics might suspect. The film received decent rather than adulatory reviews, many of which suggested that its portrayal of the young Donald Trump and his relationship with his mentor Roy Cohn was either too generous or unfairly maligned the younger Trump, depending on where your individual politics stood.

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.