The singular piece of publicity most helpful to The Apprentice, a film about Donald Trump that opened in the US last week and opens in the UK this Friday, is the fact its subject tried to block the movie’s release. The title refers to Trump’s adventures as a young man under the informal mentorship of the notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn – former chief counsel for Joseph McCarthy, among other things – and from whom, the movie suggests, Trump picked up much of his conniving and ruthlessness. Trump is so lurid in life that he may be impossible to fictionalise, but the movie has a good crack. That it fails leaves one feeling vaguely cheated of an opportunity to deepen one’s loathing for Trump with a little more background and insight.
With the US election two and half weeks away, any representation of Trump, if it’s not up to scratch, risks looking like either an act of hubris or total obliviousness. The Apprentice, which languished in development for years before getting a boost when the actor Jeremy Strong agreed to play Cohn, is at best a tabloid romp in which Trump-as-playboy is compellingly rendered and at worst a piece of counterintuitivism so obvious it’s more predictable than a straightforward hatchet job. Sebastian Stan, as the young Trump, injects just the right level of nascent tics into his performance – the pursed lips, the flapping hands, the constant faffing with the hair – so that he appears physically very convincing. At the front end of the movie, the film-makers also make Trump appear gauchely, winningly, absurdly sympathetic.
We see Trump, a teetotaller, throwing up in the street after Cohn forces him to drink neat spirits while discussing a business deal. We see him dithering, shocked and naive, in the face of Cohn’s blackmailing of city officials. We see him trying to deal with his alcoholic brother, Freddy, with a few stabs at largesse. Later, we see porny shots of Trump getting a blowjob, and, in a scene that seems to have dropped in from a different movie entirely, a shot of him raping his first wife, Ivana, on the floor of the Trump Tower penthouse – a fictionalised account of an incident that was mentioned in the couple’s divorce proceedings, but which Ivana later walked back on. We see him becoming meaner and grander as eventually he eclipses and humiliates Cohn, putting the audience in the odd position of feeling sorry for that horrible old shark.
What we don’t see, in director Ali Abbasi’s movie, is a coherent explanation for any of it, nor a reckoning with Trump’s personality that takes into account what must be considered a much greater influence in its development than Cohn – namely his father, Fred Sr. For this, you need to look in the direction of the only Trump-related product worth your time at the moment, which is the book Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success, by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig, two reporters on the New York Times investigations team. The prospect of spending 528 pages learning about the history of the Trump family business may not seem like a fun one, but I can’t emphasise this enough: Lucky Loser is a gripping, page-turning read, devastating in its meticulousness and thrilling in its narrative. If the devil is in the detail, this book is as close to Satan’s origin story as we’re ever going to get.
Here’s the thing the movie overlooks. In his 20s, Trump was not just a blond, ambitious guy from Queens with a sunny nature and an impressionable streak. He had grown up in Fred’s house, one of extraordinary wealth and privilege built on business practices so shady they made Cohn’s hustle look underpowered. Watching The Apprentice, it is possible to come away with the impression that Trump was a good businessman; venal, but smart. Lucky Loser puts paid to this misapprehension, logging every last dollar his father handed over to him, starting with the $6,000 a year Fred gave to his children – “the maximum at the time … without facing a gift tax” – up to the $400m he ultimately bequeathed his son. When Kamala Harris baited Trump with this number during the debate, he comprehensively lost it. Of course he did. It goes to the very heart of the matter: that, of all Trump’s lies, it is his claim to be a self-made billionaire that is the most outrageously untrue, and which has contributed most powerfully to his political success.
Even more arresting is the book’s deep dive into the seemingly smaller, more trivial details of Trump’s inheritance. In the 1950s, Fred took out an ad in several New York newspapers to trumpet his own achievements and, in terms eerily foreshadowing his son’s boasts, compared his shitty Brooklyn apartment blocks, apparently paid for by defrauding interest-free public lending programmes, to the Statue of Liberty as symbols of America. Fred, when angry, was fond of writing letters ALL IN CAPS, too. Donald Trump’s charm may be all his own, but everything else – the bullying, cheating, lying and profiteering – seems, like his fortune, to be hand-me-down.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
