Former President Donald Trump‘s campaign is hitting back following the premiere of the controversial film “The Apprentice,” which chronicles the 2024 presidential candidate’s early years as a real estate developer.
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” the Trump campaign’s chief spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement to Variety. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked. As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.”
Cheung’s statement continues, “This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should not see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”
A potential suit from the Trump camp wouldn’t be the first legal hit at “The Apprentice.” Dan Snyder, the billionaire former owner of the Washington Commanders who is an investor in “The Apprentice,” also objected to the film’s portrayal of the 45th president, Variety’s Tatiana Siegel reported on Monday.
Sources say Snyder, a friend of Trump’s who donated $1.1. million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign, put money into the film via Kinematics because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president.
After screening the film in February, Kinematics’ lawyers were enlisted to fight the release of the project.
Sebastian Stan (“The Falcon and the Winter Soldier”) stars as Trump, while Jeremy Strong (“Succession”) plays lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn and Maria Bakalova (“Borat 2”) portrays Trump’s first wife Ivana Trump.
The film, which earned an eight-minute standing ovation following its debut at the Cannes Film Festival on Monday, features a slew of unflattering scenes depicting Trump popping amphetamine pills, getting liposuction, having surgery to remove his bald spot, and, most controversially, a scene in which he violently throws his then-wife Ivana to the ground and proceeds to have nonconsensual sex with her.
The film is directed by “Holy Spider” filmmaker Ali Abbasi, and written by journalist Gabriel Sherman.
In his review of the picture, Variety chief film critic Owen Gleiberman praised the central performances by Stan and Strong but argued that the film doesn’t quite stick the landing after a strong start. “For its first half, ‘The Apprentice’ is kind of a knockout: the inside look at how Trump evolved that so many of us have imagined for so long, and seeing it play out is both convincing and riveting,” he writes.
“The Trump we see goes through a looking glass of treachery, leveraging his empire — and what’s left of his emotions — to within an inch of his life. And once that happens, we’re simply watching a well-acted TV-movie made up of familiar anecdotes built around the Trump we already know. At that point, ‘The Apprentice,’ good as much of it is, becomes far less interesting. The mystery the movie never solves is what Trump was thinking, deep down, when he chose to become Donald Trump,” Gleiberman concludes.
