The Apprentice
There is something fascinating about The Apprentice, and it is not what its makers intended.
Full analysis below
Want to know what's safe to watch? Get our weekly guide to new reviews and woke-free picks. No spam, ever.
This film draws you in for a significant portion of its runtime with traditional or neutral content before springing its woke agenda. Know before you go!
Not a woke trap. The Apprentice is openly adversarial toward its subject from the first frame. Donald Trump's legal team tried to block this film's release and Trump himself called it a 'defamatory, politically disgusting hatchet job.' The film does not hide what it is. The derogatory framing of Trump's ambition, the sympathetic treatment of Roy Cohn's closeted homosexuality as a tragedy inflicted by conservative society, and the inclusion of a graphic marital rape scene are front-loaded rather than concealed. Conservative audiences who see this film know exactly what they are walking into. The packaging is not deceptive. The political agenda is stated, not smuggled.
Our Verdict on The Apprentice
There is something fascinating about The Apprentice, and it is not what its makers intended.
Ali Abbasi and Gabriel Sherman set out to make a Trump origin story that explains the 45th and 47th president as a creation of Roy Cohn, the ruthless attorney who once served as Joseph McCarthy's attack dog. The thesis is that everything Trump became, the relentless aggression, the refusal to admit weakness, the attack-attack-attack posture, was downloaded from Cohn's three rules over years of mentorship in 1970s and 1980s Manhattan. Abbasi believes this is a damning portrait. What he has accidentally made is one of the more compelling arguments for why Trump's rise was inevitable.
Sebastian Stan's Trump starts the film as a genuinely sympathetic figure. He is hungry, eager, desperate for the approval of a cold and demanding father. He watches the powerful and wants what they have. Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong, giving the best performance in the film by a mile) recognizes that hunger and decides to feed it. What follows is a mentorship story that works as drama precisely because the relationship between these two men has genuine warmth, genuine affection, genuine complexity.
Strong's Cohn is the film's real achievement. He is dying of AIDS while publicly denying he is gay, attacking the very communities fighting for his survival. Strong plays this without camp and without easy sympathy. Cohn is brilliant, brutal, and tragic. He made Trump into the weapon he needed and then watched that weapon discard him when he was no longer useful. The scenes where Trump distances himself from the dying Cohn are the film's most honest emotional content.
The problems begin when the film tries to make Trump into a monster through specific incidents. The marital rape scene involving Ivana Trump is presented as fact. The real Ivana Trump retracted her rape allegation before her death. The film presents it without that context, which is a deliberate editorial choice. Similarly, Trump's late-film weight loss is depicted through a liposuction surgery and a speed diet that reads as grotesque body horror rather than biography. These choices reveal the film's agenda more nakedly than anything in Sherman's screenplay.
The 1970s and 1980s New York setting is rendered with obvious care. The cinematography is deliberately grainy and washed out, styled on the aesthetic of the era's actual news footage. This is Abbasi being formally smart and it works. The scenes of Trump navigating the Studio 54 crowd, learning to hold a room, watching Cohn perform his social magic, are genuinely engaging filmmaking.
Here is what conservatives need to understand about this film: it is a more complicated piece of work than Trump's own description suggests. 'Hatchet job' implies sloppy execution. The Apprentice is a carefully made film with a clear thesis. That thesis happens to be wrong in several important ways, and dishonest in a few specific ones, but it is not stupid. Strong's Cohn is not a cartoon villain. Stan's Trump, at least in the first act, is recognizably human. The film earns its moments of genuine pathos before abandoning them for score-settling.
The verdict here is WOKE, not because the film hates Trump (it does) but because of the specific tropes it employs: the framing of conservative attorney Roy Cohn's closeted homosexuality as the formative wound that produced a right-wing ideology, the presentation of unverified rape allegations as documented fact, and the film's larger argument that success in real estate and media in 1970s-80s New York was inseparable from corruption, racism, and abuse. These are ideological claims dressed as biographical drama.
The craft is real. The performances justify a viewing. But this is not a film that will tell you anything true about Donald Trump that it has not already decided to tell you.
Woke Tropes & Content Analysis
Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier
🔴 Woke Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Conservative Figure as Closeted/Hypocritical on LGBTQ Issues | 5 | 0.7 | 1.8 | 6.3 |
| Wealthy Patriarch as Racist Oppressor | 4 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Unverified Sexual Assault Presented as Fact | 5 | 1.4 | 1 | 7 |
| Conservative Success as Fundamentally Corrupt | 3 | 1 | 1 | 3 |
| AIDS Victim Humanization / Homophobia as Root Evil | 2 | 0.7 | 0.5 | 0.7 |
| TOTAL WOKE | 21.0 | |||
🟢 Traditional Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Father-Son Dynamic and the Drive to Prove Oneself | 4 | 0.7 | 1 | 2.8 |
| Mentorship and the Transmission of Hard-Won Wisdom | 4 | 0.7 | 0.5 | 1.4 |
| Loyalty and Betrayal as Moral Reckoning | 4 | 0.7 | 0.5 | 1.4 |
| Ambition as Legitimate American Drive | 3 | 0.7 | 0.5 | 1.05 |
| TOTAL TRADITIONAL | 6.6 | |||
Score Margin: -14 WOKE
Director: Ali Abbasi
WOKEIranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi made Border (2018) and Holy Spider (2022) before The Apprentice. Holy Spider is a film about a serial killer targeting sex workers in Iran, framed as an indictment of religious extremism. Abbasi is a formally gifted filmmaker with an explicit political perspective. His choice to direct a Trump origin story is not neutral. He has said publicly that he wanted to make a film about 'how a certain kind of American ambition destroys everything it touches.' He is a skilled craftsman making a political argument, and that argument is not favorable to conservatives.
Writer: Gabriel Sherman
Gabriel Sherman wrote the biography 'The Loudest Voice in the Room' about Roger Ailes and is known for investigative journalism that is skeptical of conservative media institutions. The screenplay he wrote for The Apprentice depicts Roy Cohn as the architect of Trump's worldview, framing Cohn's three rules (attack, deny, never admit defeat) as the philosophical foundation of everything Trump would later become. Sherman's thesis is that Trumpism is an ideology taught by a closeted gay man who learned ruthlessness as a survival mechanism. This is not a neutral framing.
Producers
- Ali Abbasi (Scythia Films) - Director-producer with a clear progressive artistic perspective. His involvement at both the direction and production level ensures ideological consistency throughout the film.
- Louis Tisné / Ruth Treacy / Julianne Forde (Profile Pictures / Tailored Films) - European co-production partners whose involvement reflects the film's international financing structure. The film struggled to find American distribution due to its political subject matter.
Full Cast
Content Breakdown
Adult Viewer Insight
The Apprentice rewards adult viewers who can hold the film's artistry and its agenda simultaneously without collapsing one into the other. The film's most honest observation is that Roy Cohn's three rules, attack rather than defend, deny everything regardless of evidence, never admit weakness, are genuinely effective in a media landscape that rewards aggression and punishes nuance. Cohn did not invent these rules as a weapon. He discovered them as a survival strategy for a gay man living in mid-century America who had to be more ruthless than everyone around him to survive. Sherman's screenplay is arguing that these rules, transplanted from Cohn's survival context into Trump's conquest context, became something different and more dangerous. That is a legitimate argument about how tactics change when they cross cultural contexts. Where the film fails its own thesis is in refusing to grant that the same survival-via-aggression calculus that Cohn taught Trump might be a rational response to the specific environment of New York real estate in the 1970s, where the Trumps were genuinely being attacked by federal housing discrimination suits of dubious proportionality. The film is not interested in that complexity. Trump's victims are always presented as more sympathetic than Trump, which is not biography. That is prosecution. The marital rape depiction is the film's most significant honesty problem. Ivana Trump recanted her accusation in her memoir, stating explicitly that she did not use the term 'rape' in its legal sense. The film does not include this context. Conservative audiences should note this specifically: it is a documented factual problem, not a matter of interpretation. For viewers who can hold all of this at once, The Apprentice is worthwhile as a cultural artifact. It tells you what a certain segment of American media believes about Trump's origins. Strong's performance alone justifies the time.
Parental Guidance
The Apprentice is rated R. Sexual Content: A graphic marital rape scene. Additional period-appropriate sexual content in club and party settings. Violence: Limited physical violence. The most disturbing content is the rape scene. Language: Strong throughout, period-appropriate. Substance Use: Drug use in club settings, era-appropriate. Thematic Weight: The film deals with ambition, corruption, betrayal, homophobia, AIDS, marital abuse, and the ethics of ruthlessness. Heavy adult themes throughout. Age Recommendation: Adults only. 18+ recommended. Not appropriate for teenagers. Discussion Points: Is Roy Cohn's influence on Trump the primary explanation for who Trump became? Does the film fairly represent documented facts about Trump's early life? What does it mean that the film's most sympathetic character is a man who spent decades lying about his sexuality while attacking gay rights?
Is The Apprentice Safe for Kids?
R for sexual content, some graphic nudity, language, and drug use. Trump origin story depicting sexual assault of Ivana Trump. Language strong. Recommended for adults 18+. Explicitly hostile to its subject. The sexual assault depiction is disturbing.
Find The Apprentice on Amazon Prime Video, rent, or buy:
▶ Stream or Buy on AmazonAs an Amazon Associate, VirtueVigil earns from qualifying purchases.
Community Discussion 0
Subscribe to comment.
Join the VirtueVigil community to share your perspective on this review.