Young Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, and the Dark Arts of Power
19:54 Share

You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Actors have been impersonating Donald Trump since long before he went into politics. Going back to the 80s on Saturday Night Live, Phil Hartman donned a wig and did Trump. And then came Daryl Hammond, Jason Sudeikis, Alec Baldwin, and now James Austin Johnson.

In the reality show The Apprentice, Trump played himself as a kind of boardroom cartoon, and he made a fortune. A new film, also called The Apprentice, goes in the opposite direction. The actor Sebastian Stan doesn't play Trump for comedy. This is a serious coming-of-age film in which the young Trump falls under the sway of Roy Cohn, an amoral fixer who made his bones as an aide to the red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy...

and now instructs his young charge in the ruthless pursuit of power. Well, in life, there are two types of people. There are killers, and there are losers. But it's good not to be a killer, no? Killer means winner. So, are you a killer, Donald? After a very complicated path to completion, and we'll get to that, The Apprentice will be released in October. It was written and produced by the journalist Gabriel Sherman.

Sherman was the author of the loudest voice in the room about Roger Ailes, Fox News and sexual harassment. Gabe, just when we thought we knew everything about Donald Trump, you sat down to write a movie about Donald Trump and his becoming. Why?

You're not the first person to say, who would want to see a movie about Donald Trump? What is there to say? No, you know, I thought that when I covered Donald Trump's campaign...

in 2016 for New York Magazine. And actually, I had been writing about Donald Trump from the very beginning of my journalism career. You know, my first job as a reporter was covering Manhattan real estate for the New York Observer in just after 9-11. And, you know, this was Trump's interregnum before The Apprentice, you know, after the bankruptcy, but before he became a reality star. So he didn't really have much to do.

And if I was working on a story, I could just call up his office and Rona Graf, his assistant, would answer. And 10 minutes later, she would say, I have Mr. Trump for you.

And I thought this was a big deal being a young reporter. But Peter Kaplan, our then editor, said that there was actually a rule against quoting Trump because he was so overexposed. He would talk to everybody. And having done the research for this film, I learned that was one of Roy Cohn's enduring lessons was to play out all of your dramas in the media. But going back to the genesis of this film, so I was covering Trump's campaign for New York Magazine. I was traveling on the campaign trail.

had been to Mar-a-Lago. And something struck me that people like Roger Stone, who had worked with Trump since the 80s, would say a version of, well, you know, he's just saying the things that Roy Cohn taught him.

And it came to me in a flash. I was sitting at my desk at New York Magazine, and I had just started to explore screenwriting as another medium, another outlet. And I thought, you know, that's the movie. Like, how Roy Cohn created and molded Donald Trump into the person he is today on a very human, emotional level. Not a documentary, not trying to give information, but to really chronicle this relationship that was, you know, Roy Cohn created the reality that we're all living in today. You remind people who Roy Cohn was. Roy Cohn, as a young man, was...

counsel to Joe McCarthy in the Senate during the Army McCarthy hearings. Yeah, and even before that, you know, what really put him on the national map was that he was a young prosecutor who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair. He did the atomic bomb spy case and did a lot of unethical legal maneuverings. And from that, you know, he became this kind of wunderkind right-wing lawyer that Joe McCarthy hired. And then when he met Trump, he

He had been obviously disgraced by the Army McCarthy hearings and Roy had reinvented himself as a New York fixer and power broker, both to the mob, but also to high society and business titans. When you sat down to write this film and started doing a lot of research, this is somebody you already knew. You knew personally and you knew repertorially. What surprised you? I wanted to capture him at a moment where

before he had become the person we saw today. When he was a young, frustrated, middle-class housing developer working under his father, collecting rent. It's the classic New York story. He looked across the river from Brooklyn. He wanted to be somebody in Manhattan. And there was a hustle to him and a drive. And especially if you watch some of these early interviews from the late 70s, his whole affect was different. He was...

relatively articulate, soft-spoken. And I thought to myself, how did that person become this person that we see every day on cable TV? And so that was the idea. Let's meet Donald Trump as a 25-year-old young man who's unhappy in his circumstances and aspires to a bigger life and sells his soul to a right-wing Svengali who teaches him the keys to the kingdom. And that was really the whole genesis of the film.

You know, as you say, the film focuses on the relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump. Let's listen to a clip from the film where they first meet. I'm vice president of a Trump organization. Oh, you're Fred Trump's kid? That's right. He's Fred Trump's kid. It sounds like your father is a little tangled up. It looks like he could use a good lawyer. Tell us about it. Right now, the government and the NAACP are suing us.

Wow, I guess...

Might have to get us a new lawyer. What are we hearing there, really? Well, that's Jeremy Strong playing Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan playing Donald Trump. It's dramatizing their first meeting, which did take place at Le Club, which at the time was the hottest night spot on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. And what that scene establishes is that the Trump family had been sued by the Justice Department for housing discrimination. And Fred Trump, Donald Trump's father's lawyer, wanted to settle the

And Trump, Donald did not. And so he sought out Roy Cohn, who had developed a reputation as a combative, no holds barred lawyer. And it was Roy Cohn's idea that instead of settling, file your own counter lawsuit, create an alternative narrative, alternative facts, as Kellyanne Conway famously said, and sort of fight it in public to a draw. And so that was the meeting. Roy Cohn took on the lawsuit, defended the Trump family.

And ultimately, the Trumps settled the case without admitting any wrongdoing, without paying any financial crime. And it was seen by many as a total victory and a whitewash of the case. Sebastian Stan, who plays Donald Trump, I think might be a surprising choice to some. He's best known for his role as the Winter Soldier, a superhero in one of the Marvel movies. How did you guys...

come to select Sebastian Stan. You know, as a writer, you never know the cast you're going to get. Like, I just feel so lucky that we ended up with both of the leads. You know, we were out to other Hollywood actors, but he was really the only one who was fearless. And then what was great is that he started working on the part. You know, this was two years before cameras were old, maybe two and a half. And he would start to send me these voice memos. He'd be driving around L.A.,

And he'd send me these voice memos of him starting to do the voice and starting to practice. And so I had this kind of like, you know, intermittent diary of his, of him finding the character. And so I would always like, whenever I would see a memo on my phone, it'd be like a little treat. It'd be like, you know, Hanukkah comes early. Like I would listen to it and really love to see. And I could see him finding it.

And I think what he pulled off is so difficult because he captures the essence of Trump. How would you describe the essence of Trump? He's not trying to copy the voice. He's not trying to copy the hands. Like if you watch, say, Saturday Night Live, it's so over the top of the mannerisms and the voice. What he's trying to do is to capture the feeling of what is it like to be Trump.

around Trump. And it's ineffable. It's hard to describe, but it was a subtle performance that I thought the role needed. And so it was really fun to hear him finding that in the research. You're saying that the film, which is out soon, is not a documentary and it's a film of fiction. On the other hand, it is based heavily on

the known record, and our own impressions of Donald Trump and Roy Cohn, if we're old enough, figure into it. How much is actually known? How much is actually documented about the relationship between Trump and Cohn? What is known about their relationship, and I think was one of the engines of why I wanted to write this film, is it really is, in some ways, a tragic arc of this relationship because

You know, Roy Cohn took Donald Trump under his wing when Donald was a nobody from the outer boroughs, taught him the dark arts of power brokering, helped him, introduced him to New York society. And when Donald Trump became rich and famous in the mid 80s, Roy Cohn was down on his luck. He had been pursued by the IRS for millions of dollars of tax evasion. He would ultimately be disbarred. And

Dying of AIDS, which he maintained to his deathbed was liver cancer. This was part of his denial of being gay. Which is something we see in the play, Tony Kushner's Angels in America. And so Donald really, as the film argues, owes most of his early success to this relationship. And at the end, Donald, when Roy got sick, cut him loose. And there's this famous quote I read that Roy was quoted, I believe it was in one of Wayne Barrett's books.

longtime investigative reporter for The Village Voice, where Roy Cohn was quoted as saying, I can't believe Donald is doing this. He pisses ice water.

And I thought to myself, you know, Roy Cohn is, you know, in many corners regarded as one of the most reviled figures of the 20th century. And if Donald Trump could make this man feel hurt, what does that say about Donald Trump? And so that was the endpoint of this relationship, something that starts off incredibly close, sort of has father-sons overtones to it, and at the end ends in betrayal. And I think that was the journey that I wanted the audience to go on.

Has Donald Trump seen this film? He has not. We've offered to screen it for him and would very much like him to. The movie premiered at Cannes, and minutes after the premiere, Donald Trump's campaign released a statement threatening a lawsuit. This was very much straight out of the Roy Cohn playbook. And they hadn't obviously seen the film. Suddenly the movie got sort of cast into this political left-right schema. And it's not that. It's a humanist...

work of drama. It's about two men, obviously incredibly controversial characters, but about how this one relationship sort of changed the course of modern American history. And so there's probably parts of the film that I could imagine Donald Trump liking a lot, some that he obviously wouldn't like. What would he like? Well, I think the early parts of the film accurately portray

ambition and his vision that New York City in the mid-1970s was actually going to come back. The city was bankrupt. Nearly bankrupt. Yeah. Crime was out of control. And Trump thought that midtown Manhattan would eventually become a temple of capitalism that it is today. And

And so he had the vision to transform the old Commodore Hotel at Grand Central Terminal into a luxury Hyatt Hotel. He was one of the only developers who was seriously pouring money, not his own money, I should say, the bank's money, but, you know, shepherding the project at a time when New York was down in the dumps. And similarly, Trump Tower, you know, the idea that the old Bonwit Teller department store on Fifth Avenue was

would be torn down in a, you know, sort of giant high rise ultra luxury condo go up. You know, that was a vision at the time. I think Trump, if he had stopped with Trump Tower, would be regarded as a, you know, a successful developer. It was everything that came after the gambling, the casinos, the airline, just the hyper spending, you know, that he went out of control. But I think the early parts of the film try to represent that, that he actually was doing something that was compelling. Yeah.

He may or may not like that, but there's a scene, at least one scene, that I think he would hate and find incredibly damaging. There's a scene where the Trump character throws his wife, Ivana, to the ground and appears to rape her. The scene is based on statements that Ivana made and later recanted during their divorce proceedings. Why did you and the filmmakers decide to include this? Well, I think that that scene is incredibly important to the film. It's obviously not the entire film, but...

You know, several things. Number one, Ivana Trump made these statements, that allegation that Trump violently assaulted her in their triplex under oath during a divorce deposition. Her subsequent statements were made under pressure from Trump's lawyers prior to the publication of a 1993 biography by Harry Hurt called The Lost Tycoon.

Then when Donald Trump was running for president in 2015, the media started covering the story and she issued sort of a further denial by saying that the original statement was nonsense. And so, you know, now I'm in as a screenwriter again, I'm taking off my reporter hat and putting on a dramatist's hat. What statement feels the most true, emotionally true to me? It's actually the statement she made closest in time to the event, which

under the most threat of lying, which is a perjury. And so that's what I felt was the most accurate depiction of that moment. And so I wanted to put that in the film because I also felt that if you're going to dramatize the origin of Trump's character, obviously he would go on to be accused credibly by multiple women of sexual misconduct. Trump, of course, denies every allegation of misconduct. What did the lawyers say?

You know, they did their jobs. They were tough. You know, making movies is not dissimilar than journalism. Everything, you know, if you're going to actually go on a limb has to be vetted in some way. And they had my back. You know, I showed them the record and they agreed that, you know, we stayed true to the record. You've got a situation where the film also depicts Trump as popping amphetamine pills, getting liposuction. Mm-hmm.

And I don't know if this is the most embarrassing thing too, but also having surgery to remove his bald spot. Um,

All those come from evidence? Mm-hmm. All those come from published reports, books, articles. So I felt like Trump might deny them, but I believe those accounts... When did you start writing the film? In 2017. In 2017? Yeah. And filming didn't begin until... Until November of 23. Yeah, almost seven years. Why the long distance? Well, the gears of Hollywood turn slowly, so that's one. A lot of movies have long gestations. Were people hesitant to make a movie about it? But yes, I think...

Irrespective of moviemaking process, I had a lot of rejections. My producer and I took it to studios. They said, if we're a big media conglomerate, we can't finance a movie about Donald Trump. We finance the movie independently. Who are your main financers? Well, this is a funny story. And some of this has been covered. But our movie almost never was released because our main financier,

was the son-in-law of a Republican billionaire. Who's that? Dan Snyder, who used to own the Washington football team. So what held things up? And how did that happen? The flashpoint was, you know, the depiction of this rape scene. This violent sexual act that, you know, they felt...

They didn't want the movie. I, myself, and the film. They didn't want it. Mark, and I assumed, I've never met or spoken to Dan Snyder. They did not want to release the movie. We got a distributor in America, finally, after many months. Right. But Mark Rappaport, Kinematics' company, which was financed by Dan Snyder, had to approve any distribution deal. So what we did was we raised money from investors. We raised $7 million, and we bought them out.

You bought out the Snyder position. And so they relinquished their stake in the movie and then were now free to go forward. You mentioned that after the premiere, Trump's attorney sent a cease and desist letter to stop the film's release. How did that affect your conversations with the studios? That was terrible. I mean, that, I really, it was a really disappointing experience for me coming out of Cannes to getting an eight-minute standing ovation, having worked on this movie for seven years,

And every major Hollywood studio and streamer

refused to buy the movie. They did not want to get sued by Trump. Or the other thing that I really found chilling was the word I got back was that they worried that if Trump became president, he would use the regulatory state to punish their companies. You know, he famously tried to block the AT&T merger. And so the corporate, quote, corporate Hollywood just wanted nothing to do with this movie. And so there was a real chilling effect there.

And it wasn't until later this summer that we were able to get an independent distributor, Briarcliff Entertainment, to take the risk on the movie. There's something ironic here, Gabe. Hollywood is thought of as uniformly liberal, and yet...

collective Hollywood walked away from this film. Yeah, I mean, that's one of the biggest, you know, one of the canards that the right wing likes to sell America is that Hollywood is liberal. I mean, on social issues, you know, sure. And on an individual level, you know, celebrities take stands for causes that they believe in. But as an industry, if you look at the output of Hollywood, it's

It is, you know, manifestly not liberal. In fact, I would argue that Hollywood as a corporate entity is very conservative. I mean, well, if you're running a giant studio or a streamer, why would you make a movie that alienates half your audience? And that was really, you know, a wake-up call for me. And I, you know, I think Hollywood is definitely in this period with post-COVID,

post Hollywood writers and actor strikes, um, sort of the streaming bubble bursting. It's really a risk averse time in the industry. Gabe Sherman. Thanks so much. Thanks, David. Thanks for listening. And you can hear more of the New Yorker radio hour by subscribing to the show, wherever you listen to podcasts or on public radio stations across the country. My name is Madeline Barron. I'm a journalist for the New Yorker. I, uh,

focus on stories where powerful people or institutions are doing something that's harming people or harming someone or something in some way. And so my job is to report that so exhaustively that we can reveal what's actually going on and present it to the public.

You know, for us at In the Dark, we're paying equal attention to the reporting and the storytelling. And we felt a real kinship with The New Yorker, like the combination of the deeply reported stories that The New Yorker is known for, but also the quality of those stories, the attention to narrative. If I could give you only one reason to subscribe to The New Yorker, it would be... Maybe this is not the answer you're looking for, but...

I just don't think that there is any other magazine in America that combines so many different types of things into a single issue as a New Yorker. You know, like you have poetry, you have theater reviews, you have restaurant recommendations, which for some reason I read even though I don't live in New York City. And all of those things are great, but I haven't even mentioned like

the other half of the magazine, which is deeply reported stories that honestly are the first things that I read. You know, I'm a big fan of gymnastics and people will say, oh, we're so lucky to live in the era of Simone Biles, which I agree. We're also so lucky to live in the era of Lawrence Wright, Jane Mayer, Ronan Farrow, Patrick Radden Keefe. And so to me, it's like, I can't imagine not reading these writers. ♪

You can have all the journalism, the fiction, the film, book, and TV reviews, all the cartoons, just by going right now to newyorker.com slash dark. Plus, there's an incredible archive, a century's worth of award-winning work just waiting for you. That's newyorker.com slash dark. And thanks.