The Apprentice Searches for Depth in Trump, But There’s None to be Found

I have no doubt that Ali Abbasi’s biopic drama The Apprentice would love to have keyed in on some previously buried incident or relationship in the life of Donald Trump that would serve as a narrative lynchpin in the act of trying to explain how this man, of all people, somehow became the central figure around which all of U.S. history and culture has revolved for almost a decade. The director’s scintillating prior feature, 2022’s Persian language psychological crime thriller Holy Spider also dealt with a destructive brand of delusional masculinity, but where the audience is able to truly plumb the psyche of that film’s compulsive serial killer, they bounce off here from the thickly tanned, orange hide of a man who is still, even after all these years, largely inexplicable. There are really two primary possibilities: We either can’t understand why Trump truly is the way he is, or we do understand it perfectly well, but it’s simply impossible for us to accept that it could really be so simplistic, so unexceptional as portrayed here. We want the circumstances that birthed the modern Donald Trump to be so exotic and strange as to be impossible to replicate, because if they’re mundane … well then, there would be all too many more Donald Trumps rolling down the assembly line. The Apprentice hews closer to the latter view, portraying the guy who would become the 45th president as more or less a simple fool, one who grew far beyond his means thanks to a shadowy mentor opening up the initial gates to facilitate his rise to power, removing any ethical boundaries that might have briefly slowed him down.

That’s also one of the film’s problems, as a pure piece of entertainment: It tells an intensely familiar, unexceptional story of mentorship and decaying morals among powerful, affluent men. We know this character archetype all too well: Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) is the scion of a wealthy family, son of an emotionally abusive father, seemingly motivated by a pathological need to prove himself and reclaim some sense of power or autonomy that he feels has been withheld from him. That drive of course creates vulnerability to influence by anyone who can understand and take advantage of it, and for the purposes of the story that man is Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), the former Joseph McCarthy legal counsel who decides to take Trump under his wing, instinctually sensing a patsy who can be molded in his image.

In terms of its inherent structure, this simply isn’t a particularly unique or interesting relationship around which to base The Apprentice, because even if the viewer has literally never heard of Roy Cohn, could they not largely assume the presence of someone like him in the life of a young Donald Trump? Do we not assume that pretty much any fabulously wealthy captain of industry probably has a Roy Cohn or two in his own personal history, those father figures who were indispensable in teaching the dirty tricks and units of corruption necessary to continue the ascent up the ladder? That idea that Donald Trump would begin as a more or less normal, unexceptional individual and then be molded into a more corrupt and genuinely evil figure by exposure to this man is something we should almost be able to take for granted. This fact butts up against another reality inherent to Trump: As a character, he’s just not very interesting–just another greedy, potentially sociopathic rich asshole with daddy issues. He’s an object of interest today because of what he’s improbably done in the last 10 years, falling seemingly ass-backwards into the presidency and now threatening to do so once again, despite a mountain of indictments and seemingly crumbling mental faculties. And as he’s become more erratic over the years, less and less of the material presented in The Apprentice feels genuinely relevant to the shell of a symbol he’s become. The film would like to connect conversations Trump supposedly would have had in the 1970s with the compulsions that still drive him today, but it’s hard to accept he would even particularly remember those words, much less base his day to day actions around them.

With that said, the depiction by Stan of the young Donald Trump in the 1970s, around the time he first meets Roy Cohn, is no doubt The Apprentice‘s most intriguing quality. There’s at least a little bit of complexity to him here: He’s vain and preening, unquestionably naïve but energetically ambitious, coming off as something at least parallel to the types of American dreamers who make up the rank and file subjects of classical biopics. He’s a fool, but dangerously close to being a lovable fool, because of the implication that here in his early life there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly malicious to his aims–he just wants to be a “winner.” The film is at its most funny here as it depicts Trump’s greenhorn exposure to backroom power brokering, and you may find yourself chuckling at the character’s almost prudish discomfort with the excess and hedonism of the upper crust that he’s immediately exposed to in Cohn’s company. He wants what Cohn has, but he also seems to be deeply uncomfortable with it, even to fear it. Never do we understand for even a moment why Trump ever truly wants most of the things he purports to want as a young man. Is it solely to please or show up a distant father, the sort of guy who dresses down his eldest son at the dinner table for the supposed shame of becoming a commercial airline pilot? The Trump of The Apprentice just seems to want to win because he’s heard that’s what he should want.

This blank slate when it comes to the man’s genuine desires is such a common pitfall of attempting to examine the psyche of Trump, and The Apprentice offers little to no opinion on the matter. What does he truly believe about anything? Does he have ANY strong, genuine convictions about politics, economics, social issues? We don’t know, and there’s no hint of where the truth lies–anything Trump says can’t be trusted, as he continuously demonstrates that his opinion on any matter is for sale, available to whoever can help him acquire whatever prize he’s currently targeting. It’s why he’s such a difficult subject for this kind of film: His core beliefs, other than the obvious and enduring narcissism, are constantly blown to the winds. We can’t even really put a finger on why he particularly wants extravagant wealth, other than the accompanying prestige, as he seems to have no idea of how to enjoy wealth. He doesn’t enjoy recreation, or art, food or even seem to particularly enjoy sex. Nothing brings him real pleasure. Praise and respect are the sole thing we can say he craves.