Recently, convicted felon Donald J. Trump took a break from his conspiracy-peddling presidential campaign to fire off one of his classically unhinged social media rants to criticize a new movie as “cheap” and “classless.”
And, no, he wasn’t talking about Joker: Folie à Deux!
Predictably, Trump is all up in his feelings over The Apprentice, a new drama from Iranian-Danish filmmaker Ali Abbasi (Holy Spider), which tells the story of the MAGA grifter’s early days as a wannabe mogul (played by Sebastian Stan) under the tutelage of infamous prosecutor Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong).
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The biopic premiered back in the spring at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival, and since then its filmmakers have received legal threats and cease-and-desist letters from the Trump camp, but many have been waiting for the other shoe to drop, wondering when the disgraced former president would comment on the film himself.
Well, it’s no accident that The Apprentice opened in select U.S. theaters this past weekend—less than a month out from the election—and, like clockwork, Trump suddenly has a lot to say about it.
Donal Trump trashes biopic The Apprentice
At 12:48 a.m. last night (way past his bed time), Trump took to Truth Social to unleash a bruised ego tirade against the film, calling it a “cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job” and whining its strategic release date was an attempt to try and hurt the—in his words—”Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country.”
Trump, where is this “great political movement” you speak of? You mean the one that has trouble filling stadiums at those regular public ramblings you call campaign stops?
In his rant, he specifically calls out the film’s writer, Gabriel Sherman, describing him as a “pile of garbage” and adding he’s, “a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but chose to ignore it.” Whatever that means.
Trump also takes issue with The Apprentice‘s depiction of his relationship with his first wife Ivana (played by the Borat sequel’s Maria Bakalova), which reportedly involves scenes of verbal and sexual abuse based on her testimony in their divorce proceedings, which she later attempted to walk back.
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Also in the screed, the man who has been legally defined as a sexual predator maintains that Ivana “was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died.”
Curiously, Trump has very little to say about Sebastian Stan’s portrayal of him. Probably because, even beneath the spray tan and the bad hairpiece, the handsome actor’s version of the young mogul is the best he’s ever looked. (Stan, for his part, revealed he drank four Coca-Colas a day to prepare for the role, putting on 15 pounds.)
After reading all of this, we couldn’t help but wonder: Has Trump ever heard of the “Streisand effect’?
Remember when Barbra Streisand tried to suppress the publication of a photo of her Malibu home in order to keep it private, but only wound up driving more interest in the process? Well, this feels pretty similar, and we have to imagine that, by giving The Apprentice any attention at all, Trump’s only going to help ticket sales!
Director Ali Abbasi seems to understand this, posting the rant to X—even though it indirectly calls him “human scum”—and cheekily writing, “thanks for getting back to us, [Trump.]”
Echoing his earlier offer to screen the film for his subject and start a dialogue, the filmmaker adds, “I am available to talk further if you want. Today is a tight day [with] a lot of press for The Apprentice, but I might be able to give you a call tomorrow.”
We’re just dying imagining the chaos that would ensue if Abbasi actually got to show the movie at Mar-a-Lago!
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But there’s one other detail from Trump’s rant we want to double-back on: He questions whether the film’s producers “even have the right” to use the name The Apprentice “without approval,” which is of course in reference to his long-running NBC reality competition show of the same name.
What’s especially funny is that you can no longer Google “The Apprentice” or even “The Apprentice Donald Trump” without getting tons of tons of hits for the movie. If you were actually looking for the NBC TV show, you’d have to scroll pretty far down the search results to find anything about it—and the more Trump posts about the film, the more buried it’s going to get!
As for actual news about the reality TV version of The Apprentice (which has been off the air since 2017), well, that’s not looking good for Trump either…
Just today, journalist Geraldo Rivera—who was a runner up on the seventh iteration of The Celebrity Apprentice—called Trump a “sore loser” and endorsed Kamala Harris for president: “However you justify voting for Trump, adopting his big lie about the stolen election makes you a liar,” he writes.
Just a reminder that Rivera is a registered Republican and once considered Trump a friend. Ouch, that one’s got to hurt!
And then there’s Omarosa Manigault Newman, who rose to prominence thanks to her villainous turn in The Apprentice‘s first season. She’d return to the universe of the show multiple times over its run—becoming it’s most infamous alum—and eventually joined Trump’s White House staff in 2017, but was fired before the year was up.
In a new interview with Variety, she makes its resoundingly clear that she no longer supports Trump and also plans to vote for the Harris/Walz ticket:
“Donald Trump squandered the greatest opportunity he had in his life to be a consequential leader, to shape the direction of our nation and bend it toward something positive,” Manigault Newman says. “He opted to go to the dark side. That’s why I have no reservation in—I guess I’m saying this for the first time—completely, 100 percent endorsing Kamala Harris for President.”
Looks like everyone who’s shared screen-time with Trump is the past is especially eager to distance themselves from him this election cycle.
Anyone else from The Apprentice want to speak out against the former TV host and endorse Harris? With only a few week’s to go until the election, now’s a great time!
The Apprentice—the movie—is now playing select theaters across the country.
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