When we first meet Trump in The Apprentice, he’s simply the son of Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), a tyrannical father and outer-borough real estate developer with no particular clout in Manhattan. Fred openly berates his older son, Freddy (Charlie Carrick), a commercial airline pilot and heavy drinker; Donald, at least, is a teetotaler and has entered the family business, where he has big plans, even though he still has to do the unglamorous work of door-to-door rent collection.
The father-son relationship is one of the more compelling aspects of the film; even knowing the basic facts, I came away newly struck by Fred’s abusive mastery of his petty Queens empire and by Donald’s almost admirable determination to compete in a bigger pond. Though very little about The Apprentice flatters the future president, he is depicted as having gotten one big thing right: He understood in the 1970s, at perhaps the lowest point in Manhattan’s history, that there was a fortune to be made in redeveloping the seedy area around Grand Central Terminal as a luxury destination. This took some legitimate vision and guts to propose, along with an almost romantic belief in the resilience of New York; to actually realize it required something else.
Trump’s meal ticket turns out to be the tabloid-friendly lawyer Roy Cohn, by this point already notorious for his role in delivering Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, among other infamies. Cohn, whose portrayal by Strong has been deemed “uncanny” by none other than former Cohn associate Roger Stone (who is portrayed in the film by Mark Rendall), introduces himself at an elite private club to which Trump has been newly inducted. He is tough, impervious, a fount of one-liners and putdowns, and surrounded by mafiosi and younger male lovers who treat him as the ultimate VIP.
Stan’s Trump is a different kind of creature. He is awkward, unassuming, a bit shy, and at the same time hungry for the older man’s approval. “I don’t drink,” Trump tells Cohn when offered a glass of Smirnoff neat, to which Cohn replies that he does if he wants to do business. Trump ends up vomiting twice, but he gets what he was after: Cohn agrees to represent the Trump Organization in its struggle against the Department of Justice, which is suing over the elder Trump’s unsubtle discrimination against Black tenants.