If Donald Trump is to be believed, The Apprentice is a “cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job” made by “HUMAN SCUM”. I disagree. The film, about his rise to power as a property magnate in New York, shows why he is such a formidable operator. Trump has suffered many near-death experiences during his career but has always remained a contender.
Posting at 1am on Truth Social, Trump predicted the film would “hopefully bomb”. Half of him is vain enough to think it won’t. But whipped up by his wrath, Republicans hate the very idea of the movie, while Democrats feel Trump is already living rent-free in their heads without paying for an extra two hours in his company. However, the film is worth seeing for the brilliant, serpentine performance by Jeremy Strong (Kendall Roy in Succession) as his mentor, Roy Cohn, and Sebastian Stan’s portrayal of the young Trump as a darkly magnetic, unstoppable force.
Trump’s campaign rhetoric is growing meaner and fiercer by the day. In The Apprentice, he talks about how some people (namely, himself) have superior genetics. He has been deploying the same language at his election rallies, calling Kamala Harris “retarded” with a “low IQ” and ranting about immigrants’ alleged “bad genes”. Neo-Nazis flew the swastika at a boat rally for him in Florida last weekend.
He is not only more reckless, but increasingly unmoored from reality. Last night, at a town hall meeting in Oaks, Pennsylvania, Trump claimed the election was on January 5 instead of November 5 and said “drill baby drill” would bring down house prices. After two people apparently fainted in the heat, he stopped talking and swayed to Ave Maria, Nothing Compares 2 U and other tunes for over 30 minutes. Imagine if this had been Joe Biden on stage.
To his surprise, Trump has met his match in Harris. She is far tougher than she is given credit for, having transformed Biden’s faltering campaign into a winnable one. The speed with which she elbowed aside her rivals and emerged as the only credible replacement is proof of her prowess. This point is underscored in a lengthy article on her rise in this week’s New Yorker by Evan Osnos, Biden’s biographer. Within 48 hours, Harris had scooped up endorsements from almost all the power-brokers in her party and signed up more than 50,000 volunteers.
It is Trump, not Harris, who is avoiding high stakes encounters with difficult media
Despite tightening polls, I still think Harris has the enthusiasm, ground game and the crucial women’s vote to succeed. On Monday, she addressed an enormous crowd in Erie, a swing county in a northern outpost of Pennsylvania, showing she is fighting for every vote. She is about to enter the lion’s den, Fox News, for an interview with their leading anchor, Bret Baier, and is expected to sit down with Joe Rogan, America’s top podcaster.
It is Trump, not Harris, who is avoiding high stakes encounters with difficult media and whining behind closed doors about his opponent’s $1 billion fundraising haul. Maga fans are feeling tapped out by years of Trump spamming them for money and flogging everything from branded gold sneakers to Bibles made in China, of all places.
But the film is instructive about Trump’s staying power. He acquired his never-say-die attitude from Cohn as a young wheeler-dealer in the Big Apple. In the 1950s, Cohn was Senator Joe McCarthy’s red-baiting lawyer before going on to represent the mob in New York. He knew everybody who was anybody in business and politics, including Richard Nixon, and wielded that power to his advantage. With a leathery perma-tan and narrow eyes from too much plastic surgery, Cohn became a legend of another kind in Tony Kushner’s award-winning Broadway drama, Angels in America, as a closeted gay man who refused to acknowledge he was dying of Aids in the 1980s.
Cohn passed on three rules to Trump which his protege follows to this day. Number one: attack, attack, attack. Number two: Admit nothing, deny everything. Number three: Claim victory and never admit defeat. “Play the man, not the ball,” the fictional Cohn tells Trump in the film. “F*** what people think of you.” If somebody sues you, countersue until they back down. Keep fighting. “There is no truth…None of it matters, except winning.”
Actually, Trump cares a good deal about what people think of him. In the film, he is shown plumping his bouffant hair (which is weirdly similar to his Scottish mother’s lacquered hairdo) and worrying about middle-aged spread. But in every other respect, he continues to channel Cohn. When Trump shook his fist and shouted “Fight, fight, fight!” after the attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, last July, that was pure Cohn. When he claimed victory in debate over Harris – when it was obvious to viewers he had lost the plot – that, too, was Cohn.
The point is, these “rules” have worked for Trump all his life. This is why he keeps denying he lost the 2020 election and has ordered those who know better, such as his running mate, JD Vance, to parrot the same lie. There are a few brave souls who refuse to go along with this charade. Yesterday, Geraldo Rivera, a former Fox News presenter and ex-friend of Trump, called him “a sad loser who cannot be trusted to honour the Constitution,” and said he would be voting for Harris.
In Erie yesterday, Harris warned against becoming desensitised to Trump’s threats
Others are MIA – missing in action. Where is General Mark Milley, who served as Trump’s chairman of the joint chiefs of staff? Why isn’t he all over US television repeating what he apparently told the legendary journalist, Bob Woodward, in his new book, War, that Trump is “a fascist to the core”? Do we have to buy the book or read the write-ups in the posh newspapers to know this?
Where are those bold Marine Corps generals, Jim Mattis, Trump’s defence secretary, and John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, who made one-off declarations that their former boss was unfit for office and then retreated behind a wall of silence? Their conscience-salving gestures are not enough.
In Erie yesterday, Harris warned against becoming desensitised to Trump’s threats. “Watch his rallies, listen to his words, he tells us who he is,” she said. “He talks about anybody who will not bend to his will as an enemy of our country. He is saying he would use our military to go after [them]...A second Trump term would be a huge risk for America.”
Trump had a strong woman stand up to him once before – Ivana Trump, his first wife. The Apprentice depicts the couple arguing, before he sexually assaults her. In her divorce papers under oath, Ivana claimed she was raped (she later said this should not be interpreted “literally” or as a “criminal” act). The woman who conquered New York is now buried at his Bedminster golf course in New Jersey in a sad little grave with a flat headstone. Trump can literally walk over her whenever he wants. American voters have 21 days to stop him from doing the same to them.
