There was a interesting, and I think worth understanding, conversation about the new movie “The Apprentice” on October 16th’s edition of the Slate Culture Gabfest. The movie is, ostensibly, about how Trump became Trump.
The statements below start around the 15:49 mark of the episode:
Stephen Metcalf:
To me, the two big questions about Trump can’t be answered by a biopic. The first is “What is it about this country that it cannot repudiate that virus of Roy Cohen? (Cohen was a very young man, the right hand and the brains for Joseph McCarthy.) What is it about that need to other degrade and arouse incredibly deep seated, really deep seated, suspicions that Americans appear to have on the surface about alien others. What is that?”
And then the second thing is “How does someone as bad at being a business man as Trump, as unappealing, as weird, never have bullshit authoritatively called on him? What was the permission structure that in the face of this burlesque, this preposterous masculine burlesque, bent and bent and bent until he became president United States?”
I admire this movie, was very glad I saw it. I agree with you about the performances, especially as Trump. But I want those questions answered. I don’t have any sympathy for this person and that puts a biopic in an awkward position.
Julia Turner:
How about you, Sam? What about the sympathy question for you?
Sam Adams (Writer and Senior Editor at Slate):
…I think there was a real understanding that I think Cohen had and bequeathed to a lot of people about working the media and the nature of truth, and that the lack of necessity for truth that you don’t even have to come up with something plausible, you just have to change your story enough. There’s a part of this movie, kind of the kicker to it, is Roy Cohen kind of teaches these three rules of success and then Trump later claims the message and one of them is to just deny everything, never admit defeat. And I think that sort of philosophy is really there to kind of promulgate that idea and reveal that as the foundational principles of who Trump is, I think it has at least a practical use there.
