Quick Take: Trump's The Apprentice & the Hitler Movie Problem

Art always humanizes, which is why art about people you hate tends to be hard to distinguish from hateful art

I watched the movie The Apprentice (2024), about Donald Trump’s early years with super-fixer Roy Cohn, just before the presidential election.

It’s a pretty good movie, and I came out with the idea that the portrait of Trump and Cohn it presents is not very favorable: Cohn is depicted throughout as a dishonest political player for whom corruption is the very air he breathes, while Trump’s character is an overweight, insensitive, ungracious rapist.

That’s why I was surprised when the next day I checked out the New York Review of Books to find a review of the movie that describes it as “in the end, yet another bland Hollywood biopic.”

A bland Hollywood biopic?

In the review, AS Hamrah writes that The Apprentice “harps about the rules of success Cohn beat into Trump’s head: attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; claim victory and never admit defeat.” Still, the movie, he stresses, “it is too wary to put those strategies into action itself. It’s a film that wants to tweak power, at times even offend it, without quite denouncing it.” Moreover, he adds:

In creating sympathetic portraits of Trump and Cohn, The Apprentice can only become, by the end, a Hollywood biopic, with the oppressive blandness of the genre touched up as usual with movie-filtered period detail. [Director Ali] Abbasi’s 1970s New York is visibly the New York of Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon. Trump’s dream for the city is presented, at first, as ironic. Standing among the prostitutes and pimps on 42nd Street in the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD era, he insists New York is the greatest town in the world.

One wants to stop reading at that point and ask the reviewer: just how much worse did you want Trump to look in the movie? You wanted to say his plan was to destroy New York?

In The Apprentice, we have a guy who is insensitive, abusive, who tries to swindle family money from his senile father, who mistreats his deadbeat older brother, who yells at the nannies, doesn’t pay his debts. A man who spends other people’s money on reducing the size of his tummy and fighting a desperate war against male baldness, who takes pills to lose weight that leave him impotent. The rape scene is based on Ivana Trump’s — his first wife — accusation as part of their divorce proceedings, and it’s obviously fictional, but it’s hard to make it look worse than it does.

And yet, the movie also presents Trump as a person: ambitious, eager to get his father’s approval before the old man loses his marbles, shy when invited to Cohn’s orgies, a non-drinker who doesn’t do drugs, who is ashamed of his brother’s spent life and yet tries to help him, somehow. A human, you know, imperfect but not always evil, not dedicated to killing puppies 24/7. He fights with Cohn but in the end has him move to Mar-a-Lago when Cohn is agonizing, helps him as much as he can, and then gives him cheap jewelry telling him it’s real diamonds, to Ivana’s great shame and irritation.

Would we have it any other way? Would it be a better movie if Trump strangles Cohn in his sleep and then sells his disease-ridden body to a lab, if he laughs during his brother’s funeral?

After I read the NYRB review, I realized that, in the end, this Trump movie conundrum is similar to the Adolf Hitler movie conundrum. Think about it: why do we have so very few movies about the most famous guy in the 20th century?

There are movies about Hitler here and there, of course, and those that are even halfway decent make a ton of money: think of Germany’s “Downfall” (a huge 2004 blockbuster) and, with Hitler as more of a secondary character at best, Valkyrie (2008). These are relatively low-budget movies that pretty much everyone I know has seen and enjoyed.

For any film-maker, aspiring or established, Hitler is money in the bank. He had a long, famous life full of incident and historical implications. He was a penniless art student in the most brilliant era of Vienna’s history, living on the streets; a boy who survived a weird family full of death and excessively close relationships; a young volunteer who earned medals for himself in the trenches of World War I; an infatuated uncle whose live-in niece appeared dead in his own apartment. All of this before he even became Germany’s leader.

And yet very few movies get made about Hitler: because nobody wants to make Hitler, arguably in the short list of worst people in history, look human. Nobody wants anybody to sympathize in any way with Hitler. In the end, the idea that we’re all human — even Mao Zedong, Curtis LeMay and Hitler — is sometimes overwhelming and unacceptable.