40/49
The story of how a young Donald Trump started his real estate business in the 1970s and 1980s in New York with the help of infamous lawyer Roy M. Cohn. Roger Stone, a longtime associate of Donald Trump and Roy M. Cohn, acknowledged that Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Cohn was „uncanny in its accuracy.” [From Trailer] Roy Cohn: Rule Three: No matter what happens, claim victory and never admit defeat. Appeared in The 7PM Project: October 11, 2024 episode (2024). Anti Anti AntiPerformed by consumers Licensed courtesy of Domino Publishing Company Limited, (PRS) or In The Red RecordingsWritten by Paul B. CutlerPublished by BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited. The title „The Apprentice” refers to both Donald Trump’s TV show and Trump’s relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn. The film is neither a piece of demolition nor a brilliant testimony. It’s much more subtle and complicated than that. The first half of the film is set in 1973. Donald Trump collects rent from deadbeat tenants. He and his father are being sued by the Department of Justice for housing discrimination. Their lawyers are asking them to settle the lawsuit and move on. But then a 27-year-old Trump meets Roy Cohn. A shadowy figure on the fringes of right-wing politics (he made a name for himself as the lead attorney for Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt), Cohn recommends that the Trumps take the initiative and sue the federal government. With Cohn in charge, the case goes away without any admission of wrongdoing. Cohn also guides Trump through the machinations of New York politics, helping him take over a shuttered Commodore Hotel, secure tax breaks from city government and eventually turn the property into the Hyatt Hotel at the Grand Central Station. Along the way, Cohn teaches an impressionable Trump his three rules: 1) attack, attack, attack, 2) deny everything, admit nothing, 3) no matter what actually happens, always claim victory. The latter half of the film takes place in the early 1980s, as Trump opens his eponymous Tower. He becomes convinced that the casinos of Atlantic City will be his path to untold riches. And hire a writer to write „The Art of Business.” At this point, he has completely mastered the art of self-promotion. At its core, „The Apprentice” is an origin story. Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi („Holy Spider”, „Border”) and „Vanity Fair”; Gabriel Sherman convincingly argues that Trump was shaped, almost created, by Roy Cohn. But Cohn’s influence eventually wanes. Even as Trump’s star rises in the 1980s, Cohn is disillusioned (he’s fired for stealing from clients) and marginalized. He eventually dies of AIDS (although he claimed to his last breath that he was suffering from liver cancer). Back when „The Art of the Deal”; is published, Trump decided that Cohn’s three rules and his own fame were based on Trump’s ideas all along. Director Abbasi also points to the strange confluence of factors that helped Trump flourish: a ruthless version of capitalism that deifies the successful; a legal system easily manipulated by the rich to crush opponents or delay their own day of reckoning (after screening at Cannes, this film received a „cease and desist” order from Trump’s lawyers); an American political system that has no idea how to restrain an individual operating according to Cohn’s three rules. The acting here is excellent. In the role of Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong (Kendall in the TV series „Succession”) is simply mesmerizing. He convincingly embodies the internal contradictions of Cohn, a lawyer who shows total contempt for the legal system, a Jew who embraces anti-Semitism, a closeted gay who publicly demeans homosexuality at every opportunity.