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Editor’s note: There has been no feature film this year more controversial than the Ali Abbasi-directed pic The Apprentice, which deconstructs the carefully designed character that Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has created over decades. Threatened with legal action by the Trump campaign before struggling to find domestic distribution, the feature finally released in the U.S. this month and has come in for praise for Abbasi’s direction, Gabriel Sherman’s script and performances from Sebastian Stan as Trump, Jeremy Strong as the grim lawyer Roy Cohn and Maria Bakalova as Ivana Trump. Here, the film’s Canadian producer, Dan Bekerman, says dismantling’s Trump’s persona removes the moral judgment and allows viewers to decide for themselves — just as they will do Tuesday on Election Day.
When our movie The Apprentice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival this spring, Donald Trump’s campaign immediately threatened legal action to deter distributors from bringing the film to audiences. The film takes place in the 1970s and ‘80s, long before Trump entered politics, yet he clearly felt it posed some kind of a threat. Recently, weeks away from the election, he lashed out again — calling us “human scum,” among other things — but why did it hit such a nerve? Perhaps it’s because movies speak the same basic language he has employed to build his empire over the decades: the language of myth-building.
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Reflecting on the multiyear process of making The Apprentice, I’m left with a new, perhaps paradoxical way of looking at the Trump phenomenon. One of the most surprising things about Gabe Sherman’s script and Ali Abbasi’s direction is how they build genuine empathy for the young Donald as he struggles to climb out from under his father’s shadow. Crucially, the movie also shows how Trump learned how to tell his own story, and then wield that story as a weapon with real-world power.
Trump made self-mythology the cornerstone of his pursuit of power in the ‘80s. He discovered that by making himself into a fictional, even cartoonish character, he gained a form of impunity. This avatar also gave him clout and leverage in negotiations that less public-facing competitors could not match. In this way, he was ahead of his time. In the age of social media, many of us now know the potency of carefully curating our public persona and using it as a tool for personal advancement. It’s little wonder that the iconic — and hyperbolic — character Trump built has resonated so powerfully in our era of hyperbolized personalities.
His reputation among admirers for “not talking like a politician” demonstrates how successful, and ultimately how political his brand of storytelling is for the right audience. All stories revolve around the goals of their characters, and Donald’s “character” has the clearest – and most political – goal of all: victory. It is the North Star of every politician’s narrative, but Trump heats and purifies the concept of winning to a point where notions of truth, idealism and shame all melt away.
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The Apprentice shows how Trump came by his craft. Roy Cohn, a lawyer notorious for representing mafia bosses, taught Trump his “Rules of Winning” before being betrayed by his own protégé. Rule #1: Attack, Attack, Attack. Rule #2: Deny Everything. Rule #3: Never Admit Defeat. While Cohn used these rules to win legal battles, Trump used them to supercharge his own narrative. He climbed into Cohn’s worldview and, to this day wears it like a second skin.
The primacy of winning informs every aspect of Trump’s story-world. The main character, Donald J. Trump, is the man who cannot lose, regardless of how often he actually does lose. The secondary characters fit into two simple camps: People who help Trump win, and people who don’t. Those in the first camp are the best people — perhaps of all time! Those in the latter camp are nasty — terrible and stupid!
This becomes a hyper-simplistic moral structure and guides every aspect of the story he tells, funneling every political principle into one camp or the other. When Trump took Ronald Reagan’s “Let’s Make America Great Again” slogan and dropped the “Let’s,” the change was not just semantic. It showed Trump’s allergy to any collective sentiment: It’s not about us, it’s about me.
The arc of Donald’s political story is, of course, playing out in the real world, but we can see the shape of the tale he’s trying to tell. Story arcs come in a few standard models, as Kurt Vonnegut brilliantly demonstrated: the rise-and-fall arc, the stuck-in-a-hole-trying-to-climb out arc. Trump, however, is engineering his arc to go in only one direction: the upwards forever. Time will tell if the laws of Newton or Icarus will bend it.
In stark contrast to the obsession with “winning,” the best of the cinematic storytelling tradition has a very different purpose. It is to seek out that which is universally human, to better understand ourselves and each other. That quest often takes place in the most unexpected environments: in war zones, in outer space, in the minds of serial killers. In my favorite American movie, the search for humanity plays out in the land of Oz.
After their harrowing journey, Dorothy, Scarecrow, Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion finally reach the Wizard’s castle, only to be confronted by a huge, terrifying green face: the All-Powerful Oz. Just in time, Toto tears back the curtain to reveal a mere man, pulling the levers to maintain the illusion. The threat is disarmed as Dorothy and the audience recognize the human insecurities driving the man behind the curtain. Watching it as a kid, I was struck by the lesson: A projection of omnipotence is directly proportional to one’s hidden vulnerabilities, but the illusion of power can be used to control others through fear.
Humanistic storytelling, like in The Wizard of Oz, connects audiences with elemental experiences behind the façades of power. Those connections have the potential to serve as a transformative mirror to the stale assumptions that society makes about itself. There are no mirrors allowed in Trump’s story world, where the towers may shine like the Emerald City, but the golden escalator never truly takes you beneath the surface.
Most movies that aspire to humanism of that kind inevitably will be constrained by the need for commercial success. This discourages choices that challenge the audience and stunts cultural evolution. But many artists go against their own material interests and fight with all their might to preserve that kind of complexity in their work. Sacrifices in service of deepening human connection have real value, and we dismiss them at our collective peril.
As our societies continue to divide along the seams of competing worldviews, it’s important to recognize how those worldviews are shaped by the kinds of stories their standard bearers tell. While Trump is far from the only politician whose narratives are defined by his desire to win, the utter lack of self-reflection and human dimension in his stories jaundices our broader culture of storytelling and narrows our ability to connect with each other.
Trump’s brand of political storytelling now has been adopted by his followers and acolytes. Prominent Republicans have recently been sharing completely fictional AI images and refused to disavow them even when they’re proven fake. Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, justified fiction in support of victory: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” When winning is the self-validating end goal, the story can completely untether itself from all other concerns including verifiable reality.
Cohn taught Trump how to use threats to create an illusion of omnipotence. In one scene in the movie, he brings Trump into his secret tape room and plays recordings of powerful officials in compromising positions. The existence of those recordings was all that was needed to sway them to his will. Cohn understood that the fundamental fabric of America is woven with narratives that appeal to our most powerful emotions including hope, but especially fear. He knew that even the legal system itself is subordinate to those narratives and that if someone is bold enough to wield this power, they gain an advantage over those that earnestly respect the law. After Cohn’s death, Donald stepped behind the wizard’s curtain himself. He impersonated his own publicist, bragged about fictional awards, lied about his wealth, pulling the levers that project the giant orange face.
Instead of the moral judgments made by most antagonistic portrayals of Trump, our movie instead dismantles the caricature that Trump has made of himself by showing the origin of his mystique and power. The Apprentice reveals the frail humanity behind the curtain, deflates the power of the giant faces, and urges us to finally, collectively, turn the page to the last chapter of this strange story.
