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The story of how a young Donald Trump started his real estate business in 1970s and 1980s New York with the help of infamous attorney Roy M. Cohn. Longtime associate of Donald Trump and Roy M. Cohn Roger Stone admitted that Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Cohn was „uncannily accurate.” [Trailer Clip] Roy Cohn: Rule #3: No matter what, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Featured in The 7PM Project: Episode dated October 11, 2024 (2024). Anti Anti AntiPerformed by ConsumersLicensed by Domino Publishing Company Limited, (PRS)obo In The Red RecordingsWritten by Paul B. CutlerPublished by BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited.. The title „The Apprentice” is a reference to both Donald Trump’s television show and Trump’s relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn. The film is neither a critique nor a glowing testimonial. It is much more nuanced and complicated than that. The first half of the film is set in 1973. Donald Trump is collecting rent from deadbeat tenants. He and his father are being sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination. Their lawyers urge them to settle the case and move on. But then, twenty-seven-year-old Trump meets Roy Cohn. A shady figure on the fringes of right-wing politics (he made his name as the lead lawyer in Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt), Cohn urges the Trumps to take the initiative and sue the federal government. With Cohn at the helm, the case ends without an admission of wrongdoing. Cohn also guides Trump through the machinations of New York politics, helping him take over a condemned Commodore Hotel, win tax breaks from the city government, and eventually turn the property into the Hyatt Hotel at Grand Central Station. Along the way, Cohn teaches an impressionable Trump his three rules: 1) Attack, attack, attack, 2) Deny everything, admit nothing, and 3) No matter what, always claim victory. The second half of the film is set in the early 1980s. Trump opens the tower that bears his name. He is convinced that Atlantic City’s casinos will be his path to untold riches. And he hires a screenwriter to write “The Art of the Deal.” By this point, he has mastered the art of self-promotion. At its heart, “The Apprentice” is an origin story. Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (“Holy Spider,” “Border”) and “Vanity Fair” screenwriter Gabriel Sherman make a compelling case that Trump was shaped, almost created, by Roy Cohn. But Cohn’s influence eventually fades. As Trump rose to prominence in the 1980s, Cohn was disgraced (disbarred for stealing from clients) and marginalized. He eventually died of AIDS (despite claiming until his dying breath that he had liver cancer). By the time “The Art of the Deal” was published, Trump had decided that Cohn’s three rules and his own fame had been based on his ideas all along. Director Abbasi also points out the strange confluence of factors that helped Trump thrive: a ruthless version of winner-take-all capitalism that deifies the successful; a legal system easily manipulated by the wealthy to crush their opponents or to postpone their own day of reckoning (after its Cannes screening, 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 rules. The acting is superb. As Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong (Kendall in the TV series „Succession”) is simply fascinating. He convincingly embodies Cohn’s inner contradictions, a lawyer who displays total contempt for the legal system, a Jewish man who embraces anti-Semitism, a gay man who doesn’t know himself and who publicly demeans homosexuality at every opportunity.