Donald Trump Learns Roy Cohn’s Ruthless Rules for Winning in ‘The Apprentice’ Trailer
Donald Trump learns the best-worst lessons in the world from his mentor Roy Cohn in the new trailer for the upcoming biopic, The Apprentice.
The film stars Sebastian Stan as a young Trump, and Jeremy Strong as Cohn, the infamous prosecutor and veteran of the McCarthy-era witchhunts who became a mentor to the budding real estate mogul. In the new trailer, Cohn takes Trump under his wing and teaches him his essential rules of always winning.
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“The first rule is attack, attack, attack,” Cohn says. “Rule two, admit nothing, deny everything… Rule three: no matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. You have to be willing to do anything to anyone to win.”
Cohn’s words of destructive wisdom are interspersed with all kinds of chaos as Trump navigates the worlds of New York City real estate and tabloid journalism during the Seventies and Eighties. And along the way, amidst his various successes and failures, he’s constantly getting hilariously negged: Cohn tells him at one point it “looks totally disgusting” when Trump takes a bite of a cheeseball, then later quips, “You have a big ass, you gotta work on that.” Maria Bakalova, as Trump’s late ex-wife Ivana, also squeezes in a classic dig, “Your face looks like an orange.”
The Apprentice, directed by Ali Abbasi, premiered at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival, where it earned largely positive reviews but shocked audiences with a scene in which Trump rapes Ivana. Trump’s lawyers also swiftly hit the film with a cease-and-desist letter, calling it “pure malicious defamation.” The producers of the film defended its integrity, calling it a “fair and balanced portrait of the former president.”
The film is currently slated to hit select theaters in the U.S. on Oct. 11, though its arrival hasn’t come without some hiccups. The Apprentice initially struggled to find a major distributor in the U.S., with reports at the time suggesting that many companies — big and small — were wary of picking it up, lest they upset Trump’s supporters or Trump himself (especially if he won as second term as president).
Eventually, the indie Briarcliff Entertainment secured the rights to the film. The producers also launched a Kickstarter campaign to boost the movie’s profile and keep it in theaters as long as possible; the initial goal of $100,000 was quickly surpassed, and as of publication, the project has raised over $300,000.
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