I decided to watch The Apprentice again. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I needed to see if it still held up after Trump’s return to power, if its study of the young tycoon-to-be had deepened in meaning or just curdled into something too familiar, too inevitable. Maybe I was trying to understand how we got here, as though a film, no matter how incisive, could offer an answer. But mostly, I was still angry that it hadn’t swept the board at the Oscars.
It should have won everything. The Apprentice was, by some distance, the best film of last year, a forensic dissection of Trump’s origins that was neither caricature nor hagiography, but something more dangerous: the truth. That the Academy ignored it in favour of The Brutalist, a film whose monochrome solemnity masked its ideological emptiness, tells you everything you need to know about the state of the industry. A brutalist Driving Miss Daisy if you will, the type of film the Academy adores—safe.
Because The Apprentice isn’t just a good political film. It is a masterclass in acting, writing, cinematography, an entire film in perfect sync. Jeremy Strong as Roy Cohn is terrifying, magnetic, reptilian, exuding the kind of power that doesn’t need to announce itself. This is who his character in Succession—the doomed Kendall Roy—thought he was. Logan Roy’s would-be enforcer, the serious man in a world of weaklings. But in The Apprentice, Strong plays the real thing, the archetype, the genuine article, a man who doesn’t posture, doesn’t need to perform toughness because he simply is tough. He plays Cohn not as a villain but as the gravitational force that Trump orbits, shaping him, bending him, teaching him the rules of a world where morality is for the weak. In Succession, Kendall is desperate to become his father; in The Apprentice, Trump is something worse: a man so devoid of identity that he allows himself to be built by another.
Sebastian Stan, as Trump, is eerily good, not doing an impression but an embodiment, a young man with all the instincts of a predator but none of the intelligence, watching and absorbing, learning to mimic strength without ever possessing it. Under Cohn’s influence, Stan’s Trump is sharper, more calculated, his instincts honed. He is not yet the self-parody he would become, but something more dangerous, pliable, learning how power really works. Maria Bakalova, playing Ivana, is brittle yet sharp-edged, a woman whose own ambitions are just as shrewd as her husband’s but whose status is inherently more precarious. She understands before he does how their world operates.
The film looks right too. That grainy, hazy 1980s film stock quality, the cold blues and nicotine yellows, the way the cinematography feels just slightly off, like a memory distorted by self-delusion. And the dialogue, every line feels like it belongs in this world. No grand speeches, no winking at the audience, just a steady, suffocating rhythm of power being transacted, learned, internalised. The film’s score, composed by Martin Dirkov (who also scored The Holy Spider), David Holmes and Brian Irvine is nothing short of magical, perfectly capturing the era. Remember this New York, is a city scrubbing away its grime only to reveal a deeper rot, glassier, shinier, yet more predatory, where the old filth of crime and decay is replaced by the cleaner, more ruthless filth of unchecked capitalism.
Everything just works.
Rewatching it now, in 2025, as Trump sits in the White House for the second time, it no longer feels like a history lesson. It feels like a warning that was ignored.
Musk Is No Cohn
What The Apprentice captures so precisely, so devastatingly, is that Trump was never a self-made man. He was made in a much more literal sense, shaped by the hands of Roy Cohn, the lawyer-fixer who taught him everything he needed to know about power. Cohn understood how the American system really worked: how rules were for suckers, how courts could be bent to your will, how public perception mattered more than reality. He was Trump’s true mentor, the man who transformed him from a rich kid with an inferiority complex into something much more dangerous.
And yet, rewatching the film, one thing becomes clear: Cohn was the real thing. Musk is not.
The Limits of the Transactional Presidency
Their relationship, like all of Trump’s alliances, is purely transactional. Musk gets government contracts, deregulation, a near-monopoly on federal infrastructure projects. Trump gets a billionaire attack dog, a tech magnate willing to lend his platform, his money, his cultural capital to the cause. But unlike Cohn, who understood that power is about leverage, not loyalty, Musk is erratic, thin-skinned, and prone to his own self-created crises.
Cohn was a creature of power. He did not need to be adored, only obeyed. Musk, by contrast, requires worship. His wealth is not enough; he must be seen as the genius, the misunderstood prophet. It is this impulse, this need to be at the centre of the story, that makes him dangerous, not to his enemies, but to his supposed allies. Where Cohn worked in the shadows, Musk craves the light.
The Power of Secrets
One thing Cohn and Musk do have in common is their relationship to secrets. Cohn understood that information was currency, that a well-timed revelation or an unspoken threat could be more powerful than any court ruling. He weaponised secrecy, stored it like ammunition, and wielded it at the precise moment it would do the most damage.
Musk, in his own way, has taken this principle and industrialised it. He doesn’t need a network of lawyers and private investigators; he has X. Who needs secret tape recorders when you own the global gossip centre? Under Musk’s ownership, the platform has transformed into a state-sanctioned rumour mill, a place where leaks, smears, and conveniently timed document dumps are as much a part of governance as they are a part of business. He is not merely hoarding information; he is actively rifling through the state’s bins, absorbing its mechanisms, its databases, its intelligence infrastructure, and repackaging them as spectacle.
Cohn would have known what to do with that kind of power. Musk, for all his access, is still learning.
A Better Film Still to Come?
One thing The Apprentice makes clear is that Roy Cohn is still the story. Trump was his protégé, but he was far from his greatest creation. He shaped modern America, from McCarthyism to Reagan to the right-wing legal machine that still operates today. So I can’t wait for Kai Bird’s American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn and the World He Made to appear. Bird, who co-authored American Prometheus, the Pulitzer-winning biography of Robert Oppenheimer, has already told one story of unchecked power and paranoia in America. Now he turns his attention to Cohn, who not only mentored Trump but was instrumental in shaping the infrastructure of reactionary politics that outlived him.
And who knows? Maybe, one day, we’ll get a film from Christopher Nolan on Cohn in his McCarthyite Red-baiting prime. The paranoia, the courtroom dramas, the secret networks, the blackmail—Nolan’s interest in men obsessed with control and destruction would fit Cohn’s story perfectly. The Apprentice gave us the man in his later years, passing on his legacy to Trump. A Cohn Begins, perhaps.
The Apprentice, Again
Rewatching The Apprentice, I was struck by how much it understands this about Trump: that he is not a genius, not a mastermind, but a man whose success has always depended on the people around him. The film is not about a man building an empire. It is about a man being shaped by forces more ruthless than himself, a man who needs others to do his thinking for him.
But what happens when he no longer has those people? What happens when he replaces them with someone like Musk, someone whose own need for attention makes him unreliable, someone who doesn’t understand that power is about control, not spectacle?
Trump has spent decades trying to find another Roy Cohn. He thought he had found one in Musk. But Musk is no Cohn. And without Cohn, Trump is vulnerable.
It should have won everything.
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