The Apprentice: a satire that gets to be the butt of its own joke?

The reversal of events is truly unexpected. A year ago, Donald Trump was a defendant in four federal criminal cases, his social media accounts were banned for incendiary statements and misinformation, and his status as the Republican presidential candidate was still undecided.

A year later, Trump became the 47th President of the United States.

This outcome underscores how desperate Americans have felt. Despite witnessing countless absurdities, lies, scandals, and inappropriate behavior from Trump, voters were still willing to elect him for another four years. It may well be one of the most absurd developments in American electoral history.

But were Trump’s opponents much better? Not necessarily. The recent release of The Apprentice, a biopic about Trump produced by liberal filmmakers, reveals just where the Democratic Party has faltered.

The film, from start to finish, employs a satirical tone to depict how a vulgar and foolish man becomes a vulgar, foolish, and sinister monster. Like SNL and other sketch shows, it paints Trump as a caricature but fails to offer any fresh insights about him, nor does it analyze the inevitable reasons a figure this controversial rose to prominence in America.

In the end, we can only say that the Democrats neither understand Trump nor the voters they want to win over—nor, indeed, do they understand America itself.

The title The Apprentice takes its name from Trump’s eponymous reality show, but the film doesn’t dwell on his TV antics. Instead, it focuses on his mentor-protégé relationship with the notorious American conservative Roy Cohn.

This Roy Cohn may not be immediately recognizable, but hearing about the people he knew and the things he did gives a sense of his significant imprint on late-20th-century American history. Beyond being Trump’s mentor, he was a secret advisor to two Republican presidents, Nixon and Reagan, often using questionable tactics to bail them out of crises and silence opponents.

However, Cohn is most infamous for his role during the McCarthy era. Collaborating with his close friend Joseph McCarthy, he fiercely persecuted American leftists and played a major role in the trial that led to the execution of a couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of espionage—a case later found to be riddled with judicial errors.

There's no doubt that Cohn was a ruthless figure who disregarded ethics. He appears prominently in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America as a character. In Mike Nichols’s TV adaptation of the play, he is portrayed by Al Pacino—an actor known for his gangster roles, a telling casting choice.

In The Apprentice, Cohn’s methods are plainly revealed from the start. At the dinner table when Trump first meets Cohn, New York mob boss Tony Salerno sits with them—a notorious figure in 20th-century Mafia history. Cohn’s tactics of intimidation, threats, and blackmail mirror those of the mob, as he uses gangster-style maneuvers to confound politicians and lawyers unfamiliar with such schemes.

After entering Cohn’s world, Trump is taught three core principles by his mentor:

Attack, attack, attack.
Deny everything.
Never admit defeat.

Today, we can see how Trump has mastered these principles to a tee.

Roy Cohn’s later years were marked by tragedy. After a life filled with wrongdoing, it almost seemed like karma when he contracted HIV and spent his final years in pain. When Cohn first became ill, Trump even avoided any contact with him, seemingly fearing the virus could spread over the phone. In the end, however, the apprentice still paid his respects to his mentor.

Cohn’s character arc in the film is complete. If this were solely his biopic, the film might have warranted higher praise.

But Cohn occupies only about half of the screen time in The Apprentice. The other half is devoted to satirizing Trump’s various follies and vulgar behaviors: his obsession with his hairstyle, his body image issues, his Coke-drinking and diet pill habits, his objectification of women, and his manipulation and deception of family members, among other antics.

The problem is that, in 2024, we already know too much about Trump’s absurdities. We know he’s both a clown and a tyrant, both a crass man and an ambitious schemer who turns vulgar ideas into reality. What is the point of rehashing this common knowledge? Without presenting new insights, a biopic about Trump in 2024 can only be deemed a failure.

The Apprentice may have succeeded halfway, illuminating the era and the socio-political climate that produced Trump. However, it fails to dig deeper culturally or to explain why Trump resonates so profoundly with conservative voters. This reflects a certain arrogance among liberal filmmakers—they seem to believe that Trump and his supporters are too vulgar and too simple-minded to deserve real understanding.

But this may well be why they have lost voters. Liberal politicians are seen as too aloof, too preachy, and too self-righteous, so much so that they have disconnected from at least half of America. Given the choice, it seems that Americans prefer unvarnished reality over hollow virtue because, at least, the former offers some substance.

America’s liberal politicians need to reflect on this. And Hollywood’s politically active community should do the same.