Why The Apprentice, a new film about Donald Trump’s early years, is an unwelcome surprise for his campaign

Published

11 months ago

October 13, 2024

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There are three rules for success in life: attack, attack, attack. Admit nothing, deny everything. And always claim victory.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump is sticking to them to this day.

The original advice is given to a young Trump by the notorious New York lawyer Roy Cohn in a controversial new biopic which is opening in cinemas across the US this weekend, with just over three weeks to go until election day.

The movie’s release amounts to an unwelcome October surprise for Trump’s campaign. He is just the latest former US leader to fall foul of big screen incarnation.

Dan Snyder, a close billionaire friend of the former president, originally helped fund the film’s production with the expectation that it would depict Trump positively.

After seeing a finished cut, he spoke to his lawyers in an attempt to stop its distribution.

Trump’s own legal team issued a cease and desist notice to stop the “marketing, distribution, and publication” of the movie.

They were unsuccessful.

The Apprentice had its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May.

It pulled off its New York premiere in Manhattan last week after a Kickstarter fundraiser was set up to help “promote and defend the acclaimed Trump biopic that corporate America is scared to show you”.

Now it is going on commercial release in the US and Europe. It is out in the UK on 18 October.

The film’s producers insist that it is “a fair and balanced portrait of the former president” based on fact, as stated at the start of the film.

It opens without comment, playing archive footage of Richard Nixon’s “I’m not a crook” speech and his claim that he never personally profited from public office. The implied comparison with Trump is unmissable.

The film covers “Donnie” as he starts out in his father’s property business in the 1970s and 1980s – before his political career and his time as the star of the long-running The Apprentice reality TV show.

It ends as Trump commissions the ghostwriter for his 1987 bestseller, The Art Of The Deal, and undergoes surgery for liposuction and baldness.

The portrait of the future president is intimate. Sebastian Stan brilliantly mimics many of the gestures and mannerisms which have become familiar to a global audience.

Trump starts out as a soft, privileged, and highly ambitious young man.

He is shown going on to become a party to blackmail, corruption, attempts to swindle his siblings, and bankruptcy.

In a graphic scene, he rapes his first wife.

In her legal divorce deposition, Ivana did indeed accuse her husband of marital rape.

She recanted the claim years later insisting: “Donald and I are the best of friends and he would never rape me.”

Ivana, the mother of Don Jnr, Ivanka, and Eric Trump, died in 2022.

In this film, Trump is the apprentice tutored in corruption to win by Roy Cohn. Cohn persuades him that there is no such thing as “The truth”, only what you say it is.

Cohn was a well-known New York lawyer whose clients ranged from Trump, Rupert Murdoch and Andy Warhol to Mafia bosses.

Since his death in 1986, he has assumed almost legendary status in US literature as an evil manipulator.

Cohn – a closeted gay man who died of complications from AIDS – is a central character in the award-winning drama Angels In America and other fiction and non-fiction works.

Cohn began his career as a fierce anti-Communist prosecutor and worked alongside Richard Nixon and US Senator Joe McCarthy, who led the discredited anti-Communist witch hunts of the early 1950s.

Cohn used all means to ensure that both Julius Rosenberg and his wife Ethel, mother of two young children, went to the electric chair for spying.

At The Apprentice’s Manhattan after-party, Jeremy Strong told Vanity Fair: “Roy’s legacy is a legacy of shamelessness, mendacity, lies, dissimulation, brutality, and winning as the only moral measure.”

Strong is a method actor, best known as Kendall Roy in Succession, who likes to inhabit the parts he plays.

In Roy Cohn, he says he also found “a kind of guileless innocence and charm at the same time as he was a lethal, brutal, ruthless, savage, remorseless person”.

By the end of the film, Cohn is almost a pathetic character as Trump casts him off, partly in fear of his sickness, partly because of his advice “to slow down” making increasingly questionable “deals”.

Trump relents and throws a final birthday party for Cohn at Mar-a-Lago, spoilt by a thoroughly alienated Ivana telling him that the “solid gold” and diamond Trump cufflinks he’s been given are cheap fakes.

Meanwhile, the real estate tycoon completes his apprenticeship by stealing Cohn’s rules as his own for his book.

Jeremy Strong, Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova turn in Oscar-worthy performances – although the Academy may not be in the mood to honour the film next spring if the man himself is voted back into the White House.

Whether friendly or hostile, presidential biopics typically do not do very well.

Neither Primary Colours in 1998 nor Reagan this year made back their production costs.

Primary Colours came out well into Bill Clinton’s second term, too late to damage his political career.

John Travolta’s portrayal of slippery Jack Stanton, a thinly disguised version of Clinton, and his “bimbo eruptions” did little for the president’s long-term reputation.

Dennis Quaid played President Ronald Reagan in a hagiography earlier this year.

It fizzled at the box office, was panned by critics, and was quickly pulled from cinemas. It has not been released in the UK.

Reagan died 20 years ago but Facebook still restricted online advertising of the film this year in case it was seen as election interference for the Republicans.

The most successful recent biopic was the satire Vice in which Christian Bale piled on the prosthetic pounds to impersonate Dick Cheney, George W Bush’s vice president.

This year the real Dick Cheney, a staunch Republican who also served Nixon, has endorsed Democrat Kamala Harris over his own party’s candidate.

His daughter, former US congresswoman Liz Cheney, is leading the campaign against him inside the party.

Unlike those movies, The Apprentice is going live just when Americans are deciding whether or not to vote for Trump.

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What impact it will have is uncertain. One audience member at the US premiere thought it could help Trump win because “Sebastian Stan is attractive”.

The film’s Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbassi says “it’s fun to be riding on the back of the dragon”.

The scriptwriter Gabriel Sherman hopes the film “makes people sit in a quiet, dark theatre and look with their own eyes at the behaviour of the man that we might elect to be the next president”.

Donald Trump may hate the film and denounce it. But the boastful mega-egotist so painstakingly captured in The Apprentice will nevertheless be upset, one suspects, if it fails to do business “bigly” at the box office.

US

Trump seeking to ‘manufacture a crisis’ in Chicago, says Illinois governor

Published

15 hours ago

August 24, 2025

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Trump seeking to 'manufacture a crisis' in Chicago, says Illinois governor

The governor of Illinois has accused Donald Trump of “attempting to manufacture a crisis” over reports the US president was considering deploying the military in the state.

US newspaper The Washington Post reported on Saturday that the Pentagon was drafting plans to deploy the US army in Chicago, the state capital.

It comes as part of Mr Trump’s crackdown on crime, homelessness, and illegal immigration in mainly Democrat-run cities. He recently deployed the National Guard in Washington DC.

In a statement responding to the report, governor JB Pritzker said Illinois had “received no requests or outreach from the federal government asking if we need assistance, and we have made no requests for federal intervention”.

He added: “The safety of the people of Illinois is always my top priority.

“There is no emergency that warrants the President of the United States federalising the Illinois National Guard, deploying the National Guard from other states, or sending active duty military within our own borders.”

The governor then said: “Donald Trump is attempting to manufacture a crisis, politicise Americans who serve in uniform, and continue abusing his power to distract from the pain he is causing working families.

“We will continue to follow the law, stand up for the sovereignty of our state, and protect the people of Illinois.”

Officials familiar with the proposals told the Post that several options were being weighed up by the US defence department, including mobilising thousands of National Guard troops in Chicago as early as September.

The Pentagon said it would not comment on planned operations, adding: “The department is a planning organisation and is continuously working with other agency partners on plans to protect federal assets and personnel.”

Mr Trump, however, told reporters on Friday that “Chicago is a mess,” before attacking the city’s mayor Brandon Johnson and hinting “we’ll straighten that one out probably next”.

Mr Johnson has not yet commented on Saturday’s reports, but said on Friday that the president’s approach to tackling crime has been “uncoordinated, uncalled for and unsound”.

“There are many things the federal government could do to help us reduce crime and violence in Chicago, but sending in the military is not one of them,” he added.

It comes after around 800 National Guard troops were deployed in Washington DC earlier this month, despite the US capital’s mayor revealing crime in the capital was at its “lowest level in 30 years”.

According to preliminary figures from Washington DC’s Metropolitan Police, violent crime is down 26% in 2025 – after dropping 35% in 2024 compared with 2023.

In June Mr Trump ordered 700 US Army marines and 4,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles in California, during protests over mass immigration raids.

The deployment came against the wishes of state governor Gavin Newsom, who said: “The federal government is sowing chaos so they can have an excuse to escalate.

“That is not the way any civilised country behaves.”

US

Ghislaine Maxwell was given ‘platform to rewrite history’, say Virginia Giuffre’s family

Published

18 hours ago

August 24, 2025

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Ghislaine Maxwell was given 'platform to rewrite history', say Virginia Giuffre's family

The family of Virginia Giuffre, who was one of Jeffrey Epstein’s most prominent sex trafficking accusers, have said they are “outraged” over the US Department of Justice’s release of an interview with Ghislaine Maxwell.

Maxwell – a convicted sex trafficker and ex-girlfriend of the deceased paedophile financier Epstein – refuted several claims of child sex trafficking and abuse during the two-day-long interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche in July.

Reacting after the transcripts of the interview were released on Friday, Ms Giuffre’s family said it gave Maxwell the “platform to rewrite history” and showed she was “never challenged about her court-proven lies”.

“As the family of one of the most prominent survivors, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, we are outraged,” they said in a statement.

“The content of these transcripts is in direct contradiction with felon Ghislaine Maxwell’s conviction for child sex trafficking.”

Ms Giuffre’s family added: “This travesty of justice entirely invalidates the experiences of the many brave survivors who put their safety, security, and lives on the line to ensure her conviction, including our sister.”

Referencing Maxwell’s move to a minimum-security facility in Texas earlier this month, they said it “sends a disturbing message that child sex trafficking is acceptable and will be rewarded”.

“We continue to call upon the DOJ (Department of Justice) to do its job by investigating and holding accountable the many rich and powerful people who enabled Ghislaine Maxwell’s and Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes,” they concluded.

Ms Giuffre, who died by suicide in April, had previously claimed that Maxwell introduced her to Epstein and hired her as his masseuse, before she was sex trafficked and sexually abused by him and associates around the world.

She sued Prince Andrew for sexual abuse in August 2021 – saying he had sex with her when she was 17 and had been trafficked by Epstein.

The duke has repeatedly denied the claims, and he has not been charged with any criminal offences.

In March 2022, it was announced Ms Giuffre and Andrew had reached an out-of-court settlement – believed to include a “substantial donation to Ms Giuffre’s charity in support of victims’ rights”.

During her interview with Mr Blanche last month, Maxwell said Ms Giuffre’s allegation against the duke “doesn’t hold water”, and denied ever introducing Epstein to him or Sarah Ferguson.

She insisted Epstein and Andrew met separately, and said “I think Sarah [Ferguson] is the one that pushed that”, before saying that allegations Andrew had sex with Ms Giuffre were untrue, as she was at her mother’s 80th birthday celebrations in the countryside outside the city.

Maxwell then claimed Ms Giuffre’s allegation that she and Andrew had sexual contact in the bathroom of her London flat was not true, as the room was not big enough.

She also claimed that an image of her standing alongside Andrew with his arm around Ms Giuffre’s waist was “literally a fake photo”.

During the interview with Mr Blanche, Maxwell denied ever seeing US President Donald Trump in an “inappropriate setting” and insisted she was not aware of any Epstein ‘client list’.

Under growing pressure to release files related to Epstein, as he promised to do during his 2024 presidential campaign, Mr Trump has made a series of denials and claims about the paedophile financier.

In July, the president told reporters on Air Force One that Epstein “stole” Ms Giuffre and other young women from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.

Mr Trump has also floated a pardon for Maxwell, saying earlier this month that “nobody” had asked to but insisted that he has “the right to do it”.

“I’m allowed to do it, but nobody’s asked me to do it. I know nothing about it,” he added. “I don’t know anything about the case, but I know I have the right to do it.

“I have the right to give pardons, I’ve given pardons to people before, but nobody’s even asked me to do it.”

Maxwell was sentenced in the US in June 2022 to 20 years in prison following her conviction on five counts of sex trafficking for luring young girls to massage rooms for Epstein to abuse. She has asked the US Supreme Court to overturn her conviction.

Epstein, 66, was found dead in his cell at a Manhattan federal jail in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. His death was ruled a suicide.

His case has generated endless attention and conspiracy theories due to his and Maxwell’s links to famous people like royals, presidents and billionaires, including Mr Trump.

No one other than Epstein and Maxwell has been charged with any criminal offences.

US

Names released of five killed in Niagara Falls tour bus crash

Published

18 hours ago

August 24, 2025

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Names released of five killed in Niagara Falls tour bus crash

The five people who died after a tour bus returning to New York City from Niagara Falls crashed have been named.

The bus, with 54 passengers on board, crashed and rolled on Interstate 90 near Pembroke, about 30 miles (48km) east of Buffalo, New York, at around 12.30pm (5.30pm UK time) on Friday.

In an update on Saturday, New York State Police said that those who died were identified as:
• Shankar Kumar Jha, 65, of Madhu Bani, India;
• Pinki Changrani, 60, of East Brunswick, New Jersey;
• Zhang Xiaolan, 55 of Jersey City, New Jersey;
• Jian Mingli, 56, of Jersey City;
• Xie Hongzhuo, a 22-year-old student at Columbia University, from Beijing, China.

After the student was named, Columbia University said in a statement that the faculty was “devastated”.

“This heartbreaking loss is felt deeply across our community,” it added. “We are in close contact with her family and offering them our full support.

“Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with her family, friends, and all who have been touched by this tragedy.”

Erie County Medical Center, where 21 passengers were hospitalised for injuries, said that as of Saturday afternoon, 14 patients are in stable condition but remain at the hospital.

Authorities are still investigating the cause of the crash, which did not involve any other vehicles. The driver had not been charged in connection with the incident as of Friday.

State police major Andre Ray said in a news conference that the driver had become distracted, lost control and overcorrected before the bus went into the right shoulder and flipped over.

“An absolute tragedy took place,” he added. “And first and foremost, our thoughts, prayers and hearts go out to those involved, their friends and their families.”

Mr Ray added that a preliminary investigation had ruled out mechanical failure or driver impairment, and that the driver survived the crash and was cooperating with police.