The story of how a young Donald Trump started his real estate business in 1970s and 80s New York with the help of famed attorney Roy M. Cohn. Cohn Roger Stone admitted that Jeremy Strong’s portrayal of Cohn was «uncanny in its accuracy.» [From the trailer] Roy Cohn: Rule three: No matter what, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Featured in The 7PM Project: Episode dated October 11, 2024 (2024). Anti Anti Anti Made by consumers Licensed by courtesy of Domino Publishing Company Limited, (PRS) obo In The Red Recordings Written by Paul B. Cutler Published by BMG Rights Management (UK) Limited.
refers to both Donald Trump’s television show and Trump’s relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn. The film is neither a knockdown nor a glowing testimonial. It is much more nuanced and complicated than that. The first half of the film is set in 1973. He and his father are being sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination. Their lawyers urge them to settle the case and move on.
That’s when the twenty-seven-year-old Trump meets Roy Cohn. A shady figure on the fringes of right-wing politics (he made his name as a senior adviser to Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt), Cohn urges the Trumps to take the initiative and sue the federal government. With Cohn in charge, the case ends without any admission of wrongdoing. Cohn also guides Trump through the machinations of New York politics, helping him take over a shuttered Commodore Hotel, win tax breaks from the city government and, eventually, turn the property into the Hyatt Hotel at Grand Central Station. Along the way, Cohn teaches the impressionable Trump his three rules: 1) Attack, attack, attack, 2) Deny everything, admit nothing, and 3) No matter what actually happens, always claim victory. The last half of the film is set in the early 1980s.
He becomes convinced that Atlantic City’s casinos will give him access to untold riches. And he hires a writer to write “The Art of the Deal.” By this point, he’s mastered the art of self-promotion. At its core, “The Apprentice” is an origin story. Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi (“Holy Spider,” “Border”) and “Vanity Fair” were filmed. Writer Gabriel Sherman argues convincingly that Trump was shaped, almost created, by Roy Cohn. Even as Trump’s star rose in the 1980s, Cohn was disgraced (he was disbarred for stealing from clients) and marginalized.
He eventually died of AIDS (though he claimed until his dying breath that he had liver cancer). By the time “The Art of the Deal” was published, Trump had decided that Cohn’s three rules and his own fame had been based on Trump’s ideas all along. Director Abbasi also points out the strange confluence of factors that helped Trump flourish: a ruthless, ruthless winner-take-all; a take-home version of capitalism that deifies the successful; a legal system that is easily manipulated by the wealthy to crush their opponents or to postpone their own day of reckoning (after its screening at Cannes, this film received a “cease and desist” order from Trump’s lawyers); an American political system that doesn’t know how to constrain an individual who operates according to Cohn’s three rules. As Roy Cohn, Jeremy Strong (Kendall in TV’s “Succession”) is simply mesmerizing. He convincingly embodies Cohn’s inner contradictions, a lawyer with a complete disdain for the legal system, a Jew who embraces anti-Semitism, a closeted gay who publicly demeans homosexuality at every opportunity.