Trump as Apprentice -- or Master?
A recent biopic, The Apprentice (2024), prioritizes aesthetics over substance, downplaying Trump’s personal responsibility for his profound character flaws.
The Apprentice (2024). Director: Ali Abbasi. Writer: Gabriel Sherman. Starring: Sebastian Stan, Jeremy Strong, Maria Bakalova. (IMdb)
Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice (2024)—the title playfully plagiarizes the 15-season reality show that made Donald Trump a household name—could hardly be more timely, purporting to tell the story of Trump’s rise from relative obscurity in 1970s Queens, New York to Manhattan moguldom by the mid-1980s.
The Apprentice does so effectively, even if it veers dangerously into aestheticism, devolving at times into an almost celebratory visual spectacle more than a critical biographical film. With all the familiar tropes of the 1980s aesthetic paraded before the audience—the big hair, VHS scan lines, disco needle-drops, cocaine-fueled parties, and the ruthlessly individualistic pursuit of profit and pleasure—The Apprentice largely forgoes deeper analysis of one of the most powerful and dangerous people in recent history, shifting blame instead onto the shadowy master-figure of Roy Cohn.
We first encounter Donald in an almost pitiable position, collecting checks for his father, Fred Trump, from low-income tenants. He is skillfully portrayed by Sebastian Stan in an at-first understated performance that gradually evolves into all the now-familiar mannerisms: the spread hands, the pouty upper lip, the verbal tics (“frankly,” “incredible,” “the greatest”), a lexicon of superlatives and hyperbole unmoored from the reality principle. As Trump the younger makes his rounds, his father’s tenants verbally abuse him, doors slamming in his face; an overdue tenant even throws throws scalding water at him. We are almost asked to feel sorry for Trump the younger: No wonder he desires power and wealth, one might be forgiven for thinking, if this is the miserable world he came up out of. But precisely this founding narrative, this original mythic idea of an abused underdog, should make us wary of the film’s political instincts. There is here a not-so-subtle justificatory narrative being constructed, compounded by the fact that Donald, as played by Stan, appears naïve and innocent, a guileless youth who is then both hardened and corrupted by the world.
He begins life as the unappreciated and demeaned son of Fred Sr., an extractive, racist, middling real-estate developer in mid-century New York. On this telling, DJT must naturally rebel against his father’s old-world strictness—and worse, mediocrity—before falling, as if by chance, under the tutelage of the totally unscrupulous but charismatic attorney Roy Cohn, a debauched McCarthyite who brags shamelessly about helping bring the Rosenbergs to the electric chair in the 1950s. Cohn doesn’t hesitate to bug his friends and enemies alike—nor to use the resulting tapes to blackmail them into giving his clients what they want. On The Apprentice’s telling, then, DJT starts out as an essentially earnest young man who simply wants to make a name for himself.
Character development is the bread and butter of all storytelling, of course, but in this way the movie shifts most of the responsibility for his character-formation onto two powerful Oedipal figures, Fred Sr. and Cohn, which lets Donald himself off the hook. Who, after all, can blame an apprentice for what are essentially his masters’ misdeeds? Even if DJT certainly possesses plenty of agency toward the end, ruthlessly manipulating or discarding everyone around him—his siblings and parents (trying to cheat them out of a family trust fund to pay off his Atlantic City casino’s Taiwanese financiers), his wife Ivanka, his brother Freddie, even his one-time mentor Cohn—the damage has already been done.
The structure of The Apprentice is fundamentally Oedipal. To begin with, Donald must defeat all rivals from within: He does so with ease, for his alcoholic older brother, the disgraced airline pilot Freddie—whom Fred Sr. derisively likens to a “bus driver with wings”—is dead set on self-destruction. With Cohn’s aid, Donald then sets about on a decade-long road to toppling his father Fred from the throne of his own business empire, later christened “The Trump Organization” by Donald, a mafia-esque moniker if there ever was one.
Fred Sr.’s absent love is clearly formative of DJT’s own blossoming ruthlessness, according to The Apprentice, but his paternal recognition, once Donald finally has it, ends up meaning nothing to him at all: Donald has become a “king," his father finally marvels, but by then, the very attributes that have forged Donald into a real-estate kingpin preclude the recognitive force of Fred père. Perhaps surprisingly, DJT cares little for his mother: Her gushing expressions of pride in her regal son barely make a dent in an ego lusting only, in the final reckoning, after lust itself—for Donald’s desire in The Apprentice is a desire turned in on itself, which ensures its properly limitless, infinite quality.
How much of this is accurate as biography? We can leave that to the historians, but The Apprentice at least makes for plausible psychological drama; and there is a fair amount of overlap with established sources. More important than strict historicism, however, the psychodynamics on offer do ring true: One senses that Trump’s essential gaudiness, his basic tawdriness, his showy, neo-roccoco fantasies, can never fill the insatiable abyss within, no matter how many towers or casinos he might erect. Toward the end of the film, Trump meets with the writer Tony Schwartz in the early stages of researching what will become the bestseller, The Art of the Deal. “Making deals,” Trump says, “is an art form”—his art form, like Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa (he observes humbly). But to what end, Schwartz wants to know, sensibly enough: What is the point of all of Trump’s dealmaking? “Deals are the end,” Trump replies, as if puzzled by the very question.
Here at last we see his embodiment of the pure capitalist spirit, revealing its own pointless self-involution: Capital wants to endlessly accumulate, desiring only its own infinite revalorization, because that is all capital is good for. Capitalists, therefore, are tragic figures, enslaved by passions that are, strictly speaking, alien to them. In Abbasi’s Oedipal story of the sorcerer’s apprentice, then, Trump the “apex predator” finally finds himself incapable of vanquishing one last paternal figure alone, Capital itself—which even kings and emperors must obey.
The Apprentice is an entertaining, even stimulating, film, aided by Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Roy Cohn and Stan’s slowly evolving Trump. But its deep, structural problem is that it risks turning a fascist—even just a nascent one within the movie’s timeline—into an aesthetic icon. One can all too easily imagine MAGA-adjacent adolescent boys raptly watching and taking notes on how to win friends and influence people. That may not be entirely the The Apprentice’s own fault, of course, but aestheticism is a trap for all artists, and this one joyfully marches into it.
For how else can we characterize Trump in this film than as a budding fascist, one who pontificates that “there are two types of people” in the world, “killers and losers”? This essentially pagan-Manichean vision (“Killer means winner,” Trump clarifies, as if to soften his vicious ontology) is fueled by a steady, abusive intake of diet pills, which, so the film suggests, accounts for his accelerating callousness, if not outright brutality.
But there’s that lack of personal responsibility again. It’s not DJT’s own penchant for evil, it’s the pills, the film seems to say—just as it’s the malignant influence of Cohn, or the tough love of Fred Sr., that is to have helped turn Donald Trump into the bilious, vulgar, hate-filled strongman of later years—anything but Trump’s own willful wickedness, springing from within himself, from the depths of his own being.
Was Trump really, then, ever an apprentice, as the movie’s title suggests? Outsourcing all blame to a supposed master like Cohn is much too convenient; if Republicans care as much about personal responsibility as they say they do, then surely that must extend up to and include their own leaders’ life stories. Moreover, the image of original innocence lost thatThe Apprentice tries to sell does not convince. But more importantly, Trump seems—in reality, not the movie now—more like one who was always-already a fully developed master, skillfully and ruthlessly manipulating his environs, seeking out aid from the wickedest, to be sure, but acting finally of his own accord.
But whether an apprentice or a master, we may all end up paying the price for this fatally flawed man’s renewed quest for power.
And Now For Something Completely Different
How would a Harris or Trump presidency affect the wealthiest and poorest groups in society? According to the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn Wharton Budget Model, the two candidates’ taxation and spending programs are likely to produce significantly different distributional effects:
With Harris, the bottom one-fifth of the population would see their after-tax income increase by 18 percent, while the richest 1 percent would see their incomes decline by -0.5. to -0.9%. The poor will see their livelihoods improve while the rich will get slightly worse off. (Source)
Under Trump, on the other hand, the bottom one-fifth would see a negligible income increase of 1.4% by 2026. The top 0.1%, on the other hand—the richest of the rich—would see their incomes grow by 2.7% or $376,9109. Unsurprisingly, Donald Trump’s tax and spending policies will benefit the wealthiest people in America. (Source)
And here’s a reminder that Trump’s 2017 tax cuts massively benefited the top 1%. The richest percent will see tax cuts of more than $61,000 in 2025, compared with a meager $70 tax cut for the poorest 20%.
Trump’s 2017 tax law has also come at a huge cost to the American taxpayer. It was “expensive and eroded the U.S. revenue base,” according to a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report. “The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in 2018 that the 2017 law would cost $1.9 trillion over ten years.”
