There are three rules for success in life: attack, attack, attack. Don't admit anything, deny everything. And always demand victory.
As a presidential candidate, among others Donald Trump he still holds on to them today.
Original advice is offered to the young Trump by notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn (played by Sebastian Stan and Jeremy Strong) in the controversial new biopic, which opens in theaters across the United States this weekend, with just 25 days left until its release. election day.
The film's release is an unwelcome October surprise for the Trump campaign. This is yet another former US leader who has come into conflict with his big screen incarnation.
Dan Snyder, a close billionaire friend of the former president, initially helped finance the production of the film, hoping it would portray Trump in a positive way.
After seeing the finished cut, he spoke to his lawyers in an attempt to stop its distribution.
Trump's legal team issued a notice to cease “marketing, distribution and publication” of the film.
They failed.
“The Apprentice” had its world premiere in May at the Cannes Film Festival.
Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova as Donald and Ivana Trump in a scene from “The Apprentice.” Photo: Mongrel Media/Everett/Shutterstock
Donald Trump i Ivana Trump w 1985 r. Fot: Adam Scull/PHOTOlink.net/MediaPunch /IPX/AP
It held its New York premiere in Manhattan last week after setting up a Kickstarter fundraiser to help “promote and defend the acclaimed Trump biopic that corporate America is afraid to show you.”
Now it is entering the commercial market in the US and Europe. The UK premiere will take place on October 18.
The film's producers assure that it is, as stated at the beginning of the film, “a fair and balanced portrait of the former president” based on facts.
It opens without commentary and features archival footage of Richard M. Nixon's “I am not a fraud” speech and his claim that he has never personally benefited from public office. The suggested comparison with Trump cannot be ignored.
In 1973, then-President Richard Nixon told reporters, “I'm not a fraud.” Photo: AP
The film follows Donnie as he began his father's real estate career in the 1970s and 1980s – before his political career and stint as the star of the long-running reality show The Apprentice.
It ends with Trump commissioning a ghostwriter to write his 1987 bestseller “The Art Of The Deal” and undergoing liposuction and baldness surgery.
The portrait of the future president is intimate. Sebastian Stan brilliantly imitates many gestures and mannerisms that have become known to audiences around the world.
Donald Trump in Central Park in New York in 1986. Photo: AP
Trump starts out as a soft, privileged, and highly ambitious young man.
It is shown that he becomes a party to blackmail, corruption, attempts to deceive his siblings and bankruptcy.
In a graphic scene, he rapes his first wife.
In her legal affidavit, Ivana actually accused her husband of marital rape.
He recanted this claim years later, insisting: “Donald and I are best friends and he would never rape me.”
Ivana, mother of Don Jnr, Ivanka and Eric Trump, died in 2022.
In this movie, Trump is a student who is taught by Roy Cohn to win. Cohn convinces him that there is no such thing as “truth”, there is only what you say.
Cohn was a prominent New York lawyer whose clients included Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Andy Warhol, as well as mob bosses.
Since his death in 1986, he has gained an almost legendary status in American literature as an evil manipulator.
Trump's legal team issued a cease-and-desist notice in an attempt to halt production of the film. Photo: AP/Alex Brandon
Cohn, a closeted homosexual who died of AIDS-related complications, is the central character of the award-winning drama “Angels in America” and other works of fiction and nonfiction.
Cohn began his career as a fierce anti-communist prosecutor who worked with Richard Nixon and U.S. Senator Joe McCarthy, who led the discredited anti-communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.
Cohn used every means to ensure that both Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, the mother of two young children, were sentenced to the electric chair for espionage.
At The Apprentice after-party in Manhattan, Jeremy Strong told Vanity Fair: “Roy's legacy is one of shamelessness, lies, lies, pretense, brutality and victory as the only moral standard.”
Strong is a method actor, best known as Kendall Roy in a rowwho likes to inhabit the roles he plays.
He says that in Roy Cohn he also found “a kind of simple-minded innocence and charm, and at the same time he was a deadly, brutal, ruthless, savage and merciless person.”
By the end of the film, Cohn is an almost pathetic figure as Trump rejects him, partly out of fear of his illness, partly because of his advice to “slow down” on making increasingly dubious “deals.”
Trump relents and throws Cohn's last birthday party at Mar-a-Lago, ruined by a completely alienated Ivana, who tells him that the “pure gold” and diamond cufflinks Trump gave him are cheap fakes.
Meanwhile, a real estate tycoon ends his apprenticeship by stealing Cohn's principles as his own for his book.
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Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris. Photo: Reuters
Jeremy Strong, Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova deliver Oscar-worthy performances, though the Academy may not be in the mood to honor the film next spring if the man himself is re-elected to the White House.
Whether friendly or hostile, presidential biopics typically don't do very well.
Neither Primary Colors in 1998 nor Reagan this year reimbursed its production costs.
The Primary Colors organization appeared at the beginning of Bill Clinton's second term, it was too late to harm his political career.
John Travolta's portrayal as a slippery Jack Stanton, a thinly disguised version of Clinton, and his “bimbo outburst” did little to damage the president's long-term reputation.
Earlier this year, Dennis Quaid portrayed President Ronald Reagan in a hagiography.
Liz and Dick Cheney in Wyoming in 2022. Photo: AP
The film was a fiasco, was panned by critics and was quickly withdrawn from theaters. It was not released in the UK.
Reagan died 20 years ago, but Facebook still restricted online advertising of the film this year in case it was perceived as interfering with the Republican election.
The most successful recent biopic was the satirical film Vice, in which Christian Bale donned prosthetics to play Dick Cheney, George W. Bush's vice president.
This year, the real Dick Cheney, a staunch Republican who also served under Nixon, endorsed the Democrat Kamala Harris over the candidate of his own party.
His daughter, former US Congresswoman Liz Cheney, is campaigning against him within the party.
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Unlike those films, “The Apprentice” airs live as Americans decide whether to vote for Trump.
What impact this will have is unclear. One audience member at the US premiere thought it might help Trump win because “Sebastian Stan is attractive.”
The film's Iranian-Danish director Ali Abassi says “it's cool to ride on the back of a dragon.”
Screenwriter Gabriel Sherman hopes the film “will make people sit in a quiet, dark theater and see with their own eyes the behavior of the man we may elect as our next president.”
Donald Trump may hate this movie and condemn it. One suspects, however, that the boastful mega-egoist so carefully captured in “The Apprentice” will be upset if he fails to achieve “big” box office success.
