Young Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, and the Dark Arts of Power
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Listener supported. WNYC Studios. 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 aid 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

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 is 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, you know, 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 you 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. 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 were 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. And it wasn't until, you know, 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 unbiased.

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, sort of the streaming bubble bursting. It's really a risk-averse time in the industry. Gabe Sherman, thanks so much. Thanks, David. Gabriel Sherman, writer and executive producer of the film The Apprentice. It comes out in theaters October 11th. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour with more to come. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported by Dell. This season, get premium tech that inspires joy from Dell Technologies.

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Visit justinwine.com and enter Radio 20 for 20% off your order. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and we're going to close the show today checking in with the New Yorker's own Jill Lepore. Jill's a staff writer for the magazine, a professor at Harvard, and the author of bestselling works of history.

Jill, good to hear from you. And an inveterate watcher of television. Well, we're going to find out who watches more right soon. I dare you. I can call you. I have a lot of knitting to do, and I can really only knit while watching TV. So your intellectual life, your working life, is about as engrossed as possible with the uniqueness of American history, but it's when you step aside from work, you're looking across the ocean for entertainment. Why is that?

Maybe I just love the British police procedurals because they're just a step aside from the U.S. Also, there's not a lot of gun action. So it's just not a lot. There's not the same kind of swagger. And did you grow up on police shows when you were a kid?

Yes, but you're basically like Adam-12 in the Rockford Files. The Rockford Files are so good. I kind of like that. Yeah, that 70s stuff. I now have a series of rules about things I will and will not watch. What's the rules? Well, you know, one thing that actually really constrains my police procedural viewing is...

Which is a real handicap. Yeah. A child imperiled in episode one. I can't do it. I think since having kids, I just, I know, also I think it's cheap shortcut for emotional engagement. Right. Like it just amps everything up. There's a missing child. I cannot do it. Okay. All right. So let's narrow it down, Jill. We want to come up with three of these British police procedurals that our listeners are just going to love diving into if they haven't already.

Okay, so Annika is totally my favorite because I love Nicola Walker, who stars as the head of a new marine homicide unit. In Scotland, right? Boats. It was set in Norway originally. Right. So when they adapted it, they had her kind of move to Scotland from Norway. But then she still makes...

offers all these asides involving, you know, Icelandic sagas and the Norse sagas. Yeah, so it is a little gritty, but it's a very dark comedy, and it has a little bit of kind of screwball elements. Two things about Annika that are friends to me other than the actors. One is...

is that the crimes are always fishing someone out of water. They've got a harpoon through their head or whatever. And everything's set on the water. It's the nicest office in the history of the world. Yes, it's beautiful glass. Exactly. You're at a ceiling glass looking out at the water. And the other thing is they do this thing where she faces the camera and breaks the fourth wall all the time. A bridge is just this beautiful idea, isn't it? And they're often beautiful in themselves, but they're so hard to build.

You need loads of experts and getting the keystone in the middle right is a delicate and difficult moment. But the main problem with them is that quite a lot of the time when you say you're building a bridge, you're actually burning it to the ground.

Yeah. And usually there is a meta-plot that involves her close reading of a piece of literature. It's often Shakespeare. The pilot episode, it's Melville's Moby Dick, which is appropriate. And this person's being, you know, harpooned to death. But they are quite lovely readings. You know, she just...

You know, she has a John Donne poem that helps us think about this death. This one does. It does a really good job. So there is what I think of as the Jane Tennyson problem. Do you remember Prime Suspect when Helen Mirren was Jane Tennyson? Why do you insult me as if I would not remember Prime Suspect? Okay, so I think of it as kind of the Jane Tennyson problem in that it was a real breakthrough when Helen Mirren, which is a dazzling performance, has this kind of hard-bitten...

women taking over a homicide unit, confronting, you know, the old boys, et cetera. But there's a kind of, they never really know what to do with motherhood. And they sort of, they want to use it, storytellers for these, you know, when they have women who run detective units, they kind of want to make somehow like the screwed up family life serves as character development for the character. But Annika, our hero in The Aforesaid, Annika has this teenage daughter who's kind of,

Riley a half a mess, right? Yeah, yeah. And she becomes, she's a pretty important character as the series develops. Okay, so that's Annika. What's the second?

Okay, so I love this show, Karen Pirie, that I think only has had one season. I'm not sure it's going to be renewed. Karen Pirie, which is also set in Scotland. And she's sort of what a young Jane Tennyson story might have been. She's very young. She looks like she's in her 20s. So there's a lot of romance and sex and interest. And she's adorable. Like she wears these little sweater vests.

I know I'm not supposed to, you know, somehow just objectify this female character, and she has a kind of ferocity, but not at the expense of other elements of her character. Sir, I need a word with you. Are you all right, Sergeant? Chief Superintendent James Lawson, I'm arresting you under Section 1 of the Criminal Justice Scotland Act 2016. What are you doing, Perry? For the murder...

So my third was Magpie Murders, which...

Doesn't really qualify as a police procedural, but our hero is Susan Ryland. She is an editor at an unsurprisingly failing publishing house that relies for staying in the black on a single author, a mystery author who has this character,

named Atticus Punt, who was sort of like Poirot if Poirot had survived a concentration camp. And so the Punt stories, which are set in the 50s, are stories within the stories of the magpie murders. And this editor, Susan Ryland, goes on this romp to try to solve the mysterious death of the writer of the Punt books because it's going to crumble the publishing house. Miss Ryland. Detective Superintendent Locke, you can call me Susan.

Can I ask what you're doing here? Can I ask if I need to tell you? I've asked you a simple question, Susan, and I've asked it nicely. Now, if I feel you're obstructing an officer in the performance of his duty, we can do this down at the station. So you're investigating Alan's death? I didn't say that.

So she's not a police officer. She's a kind of fish out of water thrown into this event. And Anthony Horowitz, who's this very, like, crazy prolific television writer, he's really having fun here with thinking about

genre and the publishing industry and the relationship between writers and editors and writers and their subjects, writers and their characters. So I find those questions interesting. I think for me, the perils of the publishing industry might be a little too much on the nose, but you know, you get your entertainment where you can. Now, this is a tangent for police shows.

but not so far. A while back, you wrote a profile for us on Mick Herron, who's a British spy novel. I had never heard of slow horses. I'd never heard of Mick Herron until this exploded onto the screen. Apple does, obviously does slow horses and it's amazing. You can practically smell that raincoat through the screen. And tell me about Mick Herron as a writer.

Mick Herron is this really interesting guy. He wanted to become a mystery writer and he wrote a bunch of stuff that he threw away. I think he wrote like five novels. He couldn't find a publisher. But he didn't really feel like he kind of cracked the detective genre. And he was working essentially as a petty bureaucrat dealing with

job dismissal cases of people who were being terminated with cause. He was like an HR guy? Yeah, like essentially. He had to write all these reports about people that needed to be let go. And redundant, I guess, is the UK term, right? And so he thought, then he thought, well, what if I did a spy series about people

The failed spies. The spies that had really screwed up and had to be let go. What would you do with a failed spy? Because you can make an employee redundant. You can lay them off and, you know, maybe there was an NDA or whatever. They go on their merry way. But what do you do with a failed spy? You can't. It's tough to cut them off. They know too much. Yeah. So Slow Horses was a kind of genius formulation of

kind of pushing at the theme of failure. And it's a really beautiful series. I first encountered them as audiobooks, and I listened to them all. There's quite a number of them. And it's incredible narration, and the

But the TV series is, if anything, even better. Oh, it's heaven. It's heaven. So, yeah, I just was getting a text today from my youngest kid who's like, Mom, Slow Horses Season 4 is coming out. The only thing that annoys me is that unlike the way Netflix lays it all down and you can just say to your mate, you know, I think I have the flu today, and you pretend to have the flu, and you close the door and you watch the entire series in a given day, you have to wait a week for each episode. I'm not happy about that. Yeah.

So I like that Slow Horse is, oh, it's going to take me through. It's going to take us through Thanksgiving. That's a good, you just got to get to Tuesday. You just got to get to Wednesday. And then you can have a little break. And you have other people to worry about than your students. Jill, have you ever thought about writing a detective novel? Oh, God. I would give it all up in a heartbeat to do that. Wouldn't that be the best life? Doesn't that seem like the best life? If you'd start all over.

And you could do that. Would you do it? I plan on starting all over. Pomegranate juice in the gym. I'm going to live forever, Jill. I don't know about you. Jill, it's always great talking to you. Thank you so much. Great talking to you. Jill Lepore is Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard and a staff writer at The New Yorker. And if you missed any of her favorite British cop shows, we'll list them at newyorkerradio.org.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of TuneArts, with additional music by Louis Mitchell and Jared Paul. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Ursula Sommer.

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