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.
Image: The Apprentice, starring Jeremy Strong (L) and Sebastian Stan (R), is out in the US. Pic: Mongrel Media/Everett/Shutterstock
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.
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Image: Sebastian Stan and Maria Bakalova as Donald and Ivana Trump in a scene from The Apprentice. Pic: Mongrel Media/Everett/Shutterstock
Image: Donald Trump and Ivana Trump in 1985. Pic: Adam Scull/PHOTOlink.net/MediaPunch /IPX/AP
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.
Image: In 1973 then president Richard Nixon told reporters ‘I am not a crook’. Pic: AP
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.
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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.
Image: Trump’s legal team issued a cease and desist notice to try to halt the movie. Pic: AP
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.
Image: Liz and Dick Cheney in Wyoming in 2022. Pic: AP
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.
The US president has spent months verbally attacking Mr Powell.
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2:18
Fed chair has ‘done a bad job’, says Trump
There were clear tensions between the pair last Thursday as they toured the Federal Reserve in Washington DC, which is undergoing renovations.
When taking questions, Mr Trump said: “I’d love him to lower interest rates,” then laughed and slapped Powell’s arm.
Image: There were clear tensions between the US President and Mr Powell during last week’s visit to the Federal Reserve. Pic: Reuters
The US president also challenged him, in front of reporters, about an alleged overspend on the renovations and produced paperwork to prove his point. Mr Powell shook his head as Trump made the claim.
When Mr Trump was asked what he would do as a real estate mogul if this happened to one of his projects, he said he’d fire his project manager – seemingly in reference to Mr Powell.
Image: Donald Trump challenged Mr Powell in front of reporters. Pic: Reuters
Unlike the UK, the US interest rate is a range to guide lenders rather than a single percentage.
The Fed has expressed concern about the impact of Mr Trump’s signature economic policy of implementing new tariffs, taxes on imports to the US.
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1:42
Trump’s tariffs: What you need to know
On Wednesday, the president said he was still negotiating with India on trade after announcing the US will impose a 25% tariff on goods imported from the country from Friday.
Mr Trump also signed an executive order on Wednesday implementing an additional 40% tariff on Brazil, bringing the total tariff amount to 50%, excluding certain products, including oil and precious metals.
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The committee which sets rates voted 9 to 2 to keep the benchmark rate steady, the two dissenters were appointees of President Trump who believe monetary policy is too tight.
In a policy statement to explain their decision, the Federal Reserve said that “uncertainty about the economic outlook remains elevated” but growth “moderated in the first half of the year,” possibly bolstering the case to lower rates at a future meeting.
Nathan Thooft, chief investment officer at Manulife Investment Management, described the rate decision as a “kind of a nothing burger” and it was “widely expected”.
Tony Welch, chief investment officer at SignatureFD, agreed that it was “broadly as expected”. He added: “That explains why you’re not seeing a lot of movement in the market right now because there’s nothing that’s surprising.”
A powerful 8.8-magnitude earthquake has struck off Russia’s far eastern Kamchatka Peninsula, causing a tsunami.
A tsunami of up to four metres (13 feet) was recorded in Kamchatka Peninsula, leading to evacuations and damaging buildings, officials said.
Tsunami warnings have been issued for Japan, the Philippines, Hawaii and parts of Alaska in the US.
The Honolulu Department of Emergency Management in Hawaii has called for the evacuation of some coastal areas, writing on X: “Take Action! Destructive tsunami waves expected.”
The first waves in Hawaii are expected to hit at 7pm local time (6am UK time).
The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center has said waves of one to three meters (three to 10 feet) above tide level were possible along some coastal areas of Hawaii, Chile, Japan and the Solomon Islands.
Kamchatka Governor Vladimir Solodov had earlier said: “Today’s earthquake was serious and the strongest in decades of tremors.”
Several people in the region sought medical assistance following the quake, Oleg Melnikov, regional health minister told Russia’s Tass state news agency.
“Unfortunately, there are some people injured during the seismic event. Some were hurt while running outside, and one patient jumped out of a window. A woman was also injured inside the new airport terminal,” Mr Melnikov said.
Russia’s Tass news agency reported from the biggest city nearby, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, that many people ran out into the street, while cabinets toppled inside homes, mirrors were broken, cars swayed on roads and balconies on buildings shook noticeably.
Power outages and mobile phone service failures were also reported in the capital of the Kamchatka region.
The first tsunami wave hit the coastal area of Severo-Kurilsk, the main settlement on Russia’s Kuril Islands in the Pacific, according to the local governor Valery Limarenko.
He said residents were safe and staying on high ground until the threat of a repeat wave was gone.
A regional branch of Russia’s geophysical service has said that “significant, noticeable” aftershocks with magnitudes of up to 7.5 after expected to continue for at least another month.
Japan issued a tsunami warning, saying it expects waves as high as three metres to arrive along large coastal areas along the Pacific Ocean.
Image: Waves off the coast of the Hokkaido Prefecture in Japan after the tsunami warning was issued. Pic: AP
It has ordered the evacuation of some areas.
The National Tsunami Warning Center, based in Alaska, issued a tsunami warning for parts of the Alaska Aleutian Islands.
A tsunami warning also was extended to the US state of Hawaii, with the National Weather Service’s Pacific Tsunami Warning Center saying a tsunami from the quake had been generated that could cause damage along the coastlines of all the Hawaiian islands.
A tsunami “watch” was issued for portions of the West Coast, including California, Oregon, and Washington.
The US Geological Survey said the earthquake was shallow at a depth of 19.3 km (12 miles), and was centred about 125 km (80 miles) east-southeast of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city of 165,000 along the coast of Avacha Bay. It revised the magnitude up twice from 8.0 and 8.7 to 8.8 earlier.
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s disaster management agency has warned that the country’s coastal areas could expect “strong and unusual currents and unpredictable surges at the shore”.
In a national advisory alert, Civil Defence New Zealand said there was no immediate need to evacuate but said citizens should stay away from beaches and shore areas.
This breaking news story is being updated and more details will be published shortly.
Donald Trump has claimed billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein “stole” prominent accuser Virginia Giuffre and other young women from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Ms Giuffre became a household name after 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 his friend Epstein.
Mr Trump made his remarks about Ms Giuffre as his administration has faced growing pressure in recent weeks, including from within his “MAGA” base, to release files related to Epstein after he promised to do so during his 2024 presidential campaign.
The US president was speaking to reporters on Tuesday when he was asked about comments he made over the weekend about a falling-out with Epstein over employees taken from his business.
“He took people that worked for me. And I told him, ‘Don’t do it anymore.’ And he did it,” Mr Trump told reporters while on board Air Force One as he returned to the US from Scotland.
“I said, ‘Stay the hell out of here’,” the US president added.
Image: Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre in 2001. Pic: Shutterstock
Pressed about whether any of the employees he referred to were young women, Mr Trump said many of them worked in the spa at Mar-a-Lago.
“The answer is yes, they were in the spa,” he said. “I told him, I said, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.’ … And he was fine. And then not too long after that, he did it again.”
Asked if Ms Giuffre was one of the employees poached by Epstein, the US president replied: “I think she worked at the spa… I think so. I think that was one of the people. He stole her, and by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know, none whatsoever.”
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1:09
Trump dismisses Epstein ‘witch hunt’
The White House said in a statement last week that Mr Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago because he was acting like a “creep”.
Epstein took his own life in a Manhattan prison cell in August 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges.
On Tuesday, lawyer’s for his former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for recruiting young girls for the financier, said that they are open to her answering more questions from US Congress if she is granted immunity from future prosecution.
However a spokeswoman for the House Oversight Committee, which requested the interview with Maxwell, said the panel would not consider granting the immunity she requested.
Image: Undated picture of Ghislaine Maxwell with Jeffrey Epstein. File pic: US Department of Justice
The former British socialite was interviewed inside a Florida courthouse by US Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last week.
Officials have not publicly disclosed what she said.
Mr Blanche had earlier said that Maxwell would be interviewed because of Mr Trump’s directive to gather and release any credible evidence about others who may have committed crimes in relation to the Epstein case.
Separately, Maxwell’s lawyers have urged the Supreme Court to review her conviction, saying she did not receive a fair trial.
They also say that one way she would testify “openly and honestly, in public”, is in the event of a pardon by Mr Trump, who has told reporters that such a move is within his rights but that he has not been not asked to make it.
Image: Virginia Giuffre in 2019. File pic: AP
What had Ms Giuffre said about Mar-a-Lago?
Ms Giuffre, who took her own life in April, claimed Maxwell spotted her while she was working as a spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago when she was a teenager in 2000.
She added that Maxwell hired her as Epstein’s masseuse, which led to sexual abuse.
She accused Epstein of pressuring her into having sex with powerful men.
Why is the Epstein case such a problem for Trump?
Rumours have circulated since Epstein’s death about who he may have supplied underage girls to and who visited his private island.
Some of those rumours quickly spiralled into conspiracy theories, which Mr Trump fanned the flames of during his campaign for a second term.
Mr Trump promised to release more Epstein files to the public if he was elected president for a second time – but is now facing a backlash from his voter base after carrying out a complete U-turn on the move.