During Donald Trump’s first presidency, one of the most recycled op-ed templates was something along the lines of “Stop saying this isn’t America,” which wasn’t a response to the president so much as a response to those who found Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric and anti-democratic posturing “un-American.” The gist of each of these pieces was that Trump represents America’s true, ugly id, and that his presidency should have torn down the illusion that we had moved on from the prejudices of the past and were on an inevitable march towards progress. He is America, this line of argument goes, because the story of America is as defined by its greed and institutional racism as it is by the moon landing or raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and even those triumphs have their own complicated legacies. 

The Apprentice, Ali Abbasi’s chronicle of Donald Trump’s rise to prominence and his relationship with notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, takes these critiques one step further. It’s not just the attitudes of Trump that reflect America – instead, his whole life story does. Although it touches on racism and chauvinism, The Apprentice is not a movie about those things. Rather, it’s a movie about corrupted ambition, about how what drives one to be great can also destroy one physically and ethically. The Donald Trump portrayed by Sebastian Stan isn’t just a representation of America – he’s a walking talking microcosm of it, simultaneously brimming with talent and vision while also being a bloated, jaundiced embodiment of avarice. It may not be a subtle reading of Trump (fheck, it may not even be that original) but it’s blunt and brutal in a way that most modern political commentary refuses to be, and manages to both demystify Trump and argue that he is the perfect avatar for a certain kind of crass Americanism. It’s at once deeply entertaining and absolutely stomach churning. 

The biggest risk in making a movie or TV show about Trump is that it’s very easy to veer into caricature – he’s a larger than life figure, and not one who inspires much sympathy or even seems capable of introspection. Abbasi and Stan approach this task by breaking Trump’s persona down, revealing which parts are artifice, which parts are a consequence of circumstance, and which normal human emotions he might be trying to hide under the bronzer and bravado.

Rather than portray him as a huckster from the jump, The Apprentice seeks to give a young Trump some credit. It’s 1973 in New York, and even though downtown Manhattan is awash in pimps, prostitutes, and drug dealers, Trump sees opportunity in the decay. He wants to refurbish the shuttered Commodore Hotel, but he’s rebuffed by everyone he seeks help from, including his father (Martin Donovan), who seems content to make Donald risk life and limb collecting rent from deadbeat tenants instead. Trump finally finds a champion in the form of Roy Cohn, who pulls the 70s version of the “I saw you from across the bar and dug your vibe” meme by paying for Trump’s dinner one night at an exclusive club. Trump and Cohn hit it off, with Cohn agreeing to defend the Trump Organization against a federal civil right lawsuit and, eventually, help Donald work city hall and get approval to rebuild the Commodore. 

The genius of this setup is that, in a vacuum, it could make Trump look like a hero. Undeterred by skeptical investors and even the president himself, he believes in New York’s future – and real life tells us that, even though it took 20 years or so for the turn around to happen, he was ultimately right about Midtown’s potential. But this is still Donald Trump we’re talking about, and, perhaps more importantly, this is still Roy Cohn. The lawyer takes Trump under his wing and gives him his first true exposure to the unscrupulous business practices he’s now associated with, creating a kind of warped father/son dynamic in the process. Trump’s real father, Fred, was a bigot and a slumlord, but he was content to be just a bigot and a slumlord, with little interest in investing beyond the outer boroughs. Meanwhile, Cohn shares Trump’s taste for the glitz and glamour of Manhattan living, and teaches him his three rules of winning: fight, fight fight; admit nothing, deny everything; and never admit defeat – a philosophy that manifests itself via Cohn’s strategy of bribing and blackmailing officials at both the DOJ and city hall. Cohn justifies his actions by telling the initially uneasy Trump that America is a nation of men, not laws – he’ll gain nothing by playing by the rules, because “truth is a malleable thing.” As Trump begins to wrack up wins – settling the lawsuit, rebuilding the Commodore and, eventually, marrying Ivana Zelníčková (Maria Balakova) – he comes to adopt this amoral outlook on life as his own.

Jeremy Strong plays Roy Cohn as devilish, slippery, decadent, and freakish. Rail thin and artificially tanned, Strong’s Cohn introduces Trump to his now-trademark bad taste, hosting him at parties in his garishly decorated townhouse where he gets the chance to hobnob with rich and famous New Yorkers like Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner, and Andy Warhol. The modern day Trump’s blend of porn-brained libertinism with Republican politics has often been framed as a mutation of the conservative movement, but The Apprentice posits that this connection has always existed – it just used to be hidden better. Cohn brags about working for Joseph McCarthy and killing the Rosenbergs while indulging in coke fueled orgies; preeminent dirty trickster Roger Stone is introduced clad in a Speedo, fetching Cohn a fruity drink as the lawyer bathes nearly naked in a tanning bed. The New York of the 1970s might be best remembered for the crime that happened on the streets, but The Apprentice suggests that the true moral rot was happening behind closed doors on 5th Avenue, facilitated by those who claimed to be superior to the “welfare cases” they sought to strip of housing and social services even while they gave into their own vices. This idea extends to the film’s soundtrack; the street scenes are set to scummy punk rock and the club and restaurants scenes to frothy disco before the two genres are synthesized in Cohn’s house via paranoid post-punk. Meanwhile, nearly every early interaction Trump has with Cohn is framed as a descent – they walk down into a dark basement where Cohn houses his sophisticated recording system and the scandalous cassettes they produce, and his parties are lit by a hellish red glow. 

Eventually the narrative skips forward to the 1980s, and both Trump and Cohn have transformed. Relishing in his material success and media notoriety, Trump has become convinced of his own invincibility, even as his waistline grows, his hair thins, and his skin develops an uncanny orange hue. Cohn, meanwhile, is forced to confront his own mortality – although he never publicly owns up to it, he’s diagnosed with AIDS, and withers away slowly as he tries to temper the newly impulsive Trump. This doesn’t work – instead, Trump dives headfirst into the casino business, buying up buildings in Atlantic City and financing Trump Tower with debts he’s unable to pay off, keeping his energy up by gobbling down cheap speed pills all while growing more distant from Cohn, Ivana, and his alcoholic brother Freddie (Charlie Carrick). Stan is particularly brilliant in this section of the film, portraying a man trying desperately to suppress his personal failures (Freddie’s death due to alcoholism, his faltering marriage) while also exuding an air of confidence, slowly adopting the blustery hand gestures and vocal tics today’s Americans are all too familiar with.

It’s also in these sequences that Stan’s Trump becomes a metaphor for the country itself. Powered by debt and stimulants, Trump has no interest in solving his actual problems. Instead, he just wants to project the image of success even if his wealth is a mirage, and project the image of health by opting for liposuction and scalp reduction surgeries instead of exercising and eating better. Meanwhile, the stock market gold rush of the 80s may have made America look like it was thriving, but it did little to solve the issues that led to the malaise of the 70s. The pimps and the drug dealers were kicked off of 42nd Street, sure, but was the country any better off just because the twin impulses of exploitation and addiction moved to the casinos of Atlantic City instead? 

I don’t know that The Apprentice is the definitive biographical portrayal of Donald Trump, or an explanation of how he became president (the movie ends during his first meeting with Tony Schwartz as they “collaborate” on The Art of the Deal). But it does make a coherent argument that Trump isn’t an aberration. Instead, he represents the culmination of a certain kind of America, one that doesn’t believe in doing what is right so much as it believes in being right; insisting that it must always win and that second guessing is for losers. To keep up that illusion, it papers over its problems and denies that they even exist, becoming a self-parody in the process. Throughout Trump’s two terms, it’s a tendency that has only grown lazier and more pervasive. 

While The Apprentice ends with Trump on top, Cohn does not get off so easily. The prejudice and zero sum mentality he cultivates within Trump leaves his mentee without any sympathy for his situation – even after he throws a frail Cohn a birthday party at Mar-a-Lago, he has his staff deep clean the dining room, creating an eerie parallel to the hygiene theater of 2020. It’s difficult not to view Abbasi’s handling of Cohn’s rejection, illness, and – ultimately – death as a kind of reckoning for the destruction he wrought throughout his career. The question remains if not only Trump, but America at large, will ever experience such a reckoning too.