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The story of how a young Donald Trump got his start in the real estate business in the 1970s and 1980s in New York City with the help of infamous attorney Roy M. Cohn. Roger Stone, a longtime associate of Donald Trump and Roy M. Cohn, admitted that Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Cohn was „uncanny in its accuracy.” [From the trailer] Roy Cohn: Rule three: No matter what happens, you declare victory and never admit defeat. Appears on The 7PM Project: Episode dated October 11, 2024 (2024). Anti Anti AntiMade by ConsumersLicensed by Domino Publishing Company Limited, (PRS) obo In The Red RecordingsAuthor: Paul B. CutlerPublisher: BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited. The title „The Apprentice” refers to both Donald Trump’s television show and Trump’s relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn. The film is neither a rebuttal nor a glowing testimonial. It is far more nuanced and complicated. The first half of the film is set in 1973. Donald Trump is collecting rent from rent-delinquent tenants. He and his father are being sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination. Their lawyers urge them to settle and move on. But then Trump, 27, meets Roy Cohn. A shady figure on the fringes of right-wing politics (he famously served as a top aide to Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt), Cohn recommends that the Trumps take the initiative and sue the federal government. Under Cohn’s guidance, the case settles without an admission of guilt. Cohn also guides Trump through the machinations of New York politics, helping him take over the boarded-up Commodore Hotel, secure tax breaks from the city, and eventually turn the property into a Hyatt hotel at Grand Central Station. Along the way, Cohn teaches the impressionable Trump three rules: 1) attack, attack, attack; 2) deny everything, admit nothing; 3) no matter what really happens, always declare victory. The second half of the film takes place in the early 1980s, as Trump opens his namesake skyscraper. He becomes convinced that Atlantic City casinos will be his path to untold riches. And he hires a writer to write “The Art of the Deal.” At this point, he has fully mastered the art of self-promotion. At its core, “The Apprentice” is an origin story. Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (“The Holy Spider,” “The Border”) and Vanity Fair writer Gabriel Sherman make a compelling case that Trump was shaped, almost created, by Roy Cohn. But Cohn’s influence eventually fades. Even as Trump’s star rises in the 1980s, Cohn is disgraced (he is disbarred for stealing from clients) and marginalized. He eventually dies of AIDS (although he claims to his dying breath that he has liver cancer). By the time “The Art of the Deal” is released, Trump has decided that Cohn’s three principles, and his own fame, were based on Trump’s ideas from the start. Director Abbasi also points to the strange confluence of circumstances that have helped Trump thrive: a ruthless, winner-take-all version of capitalism that idolizes the successful; a legal system that the wealthy can easily manipulate to crush their opponents or postpone their own day of reckoning (after screening in Cannes, the film received a “cease and desist” order from Trump’s lawyers); an American political system that has no idea how to constrain an individual who acts according to Cohn’s three principles. The acting here is excellent. As Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong (Kendall on TV’s “Succession”) is simply mesmerizing, convincingly embodying Cohn’s inner contradictions: a lawyer with total contempt for the legal system, a Jew with an anti-Semitism, and a closeted homosexual who publicly humiliates homosexuality at every opportunity.