Donald Trump’s Campaign Threatens Legal Action Over ‘Apprentice’ Movie

Donald Trump would like to say “you’re fired” to The Apprentice. Through a spokesman, the legally embattled former president, who is currently in the midst of his criminal trial in New York City, has taken shots at The Apprentice, a new film about his early days in real estate. Trump’s campaign has threatened legal action against the filmmakers, calling the movie “blatantly false,” “garbage,” and “pure fiction.”

Following The Apprentice’s premiere at the glitzy Cannes Film Festival, the Trump campaign’s chief spokesman, Steven Cheung, issued a statement about the film to Variety. “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Cheung said in the statement. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked.” The statement went on to reference Trump’s hush money trial involving adult-film star Stormy Daniels, currently underway in New York City. “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.”

Written by VF special correspondent Gabriel Sherman and directed by Ali Abbasi, The Apprentice stars Sebastian Stan as an early-career Trump, who’s on his ruthless path to becoming a real estate mogul. The film also stars Emmy winner Jeremy Strong as Trump lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn and Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova as Trump’s first wife, Ivana Trump. The film, which received an eight-minute-long standing ovation at Cannes, reportedly features a young Trump getting liposuction, taking amphetamine pills, and undergoing plastic surgery to remove his bald spot. The Apprentice also reportedly includes a controversial scene in which Trump assaults Ivana physically and then sexually. (In a divorce deposition, Ivana accused her ex-husband of having “violated” her in 1989, but she walked back the claim in 2015, telling CNN that a Daily Beast story about her earlier allegations was “totally without merit.”)

According to Team Trump, the film “is pure malicious defamation.” The Apprentice “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,” Cheung continued in his statement, adding that the movie “belongs in a dumpster fire.”

Trump is not the only person associated with the film who has issues with The Apprentice. Per Variety, billionaire Dan Snyder, a Trump friend and donor who helped finance the film via the company Kinematics, reportedly believed he was helping to make a film that portrayed the former president in a positive light. Snyder, the former owner of the Washington Commanders—who donated more than $1 million to Trump’s fundraising and inaugural committees in 2016 and gave $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign—is reportedly “furious” over the negative portrayal of Trump in the film, and he has enlisted Kinematics’ lawyers to try to prevent the film’s release.

According to Kinematics president Emanuel Nuñez, the creative tension between Kinematics and the Apprentice filmmakers has nothing to do with Snyder and his alleged cronyism. “All creative and business decisions involving The Apprentice have always been and continue to be solely made by Kinematics,” said Nuñez. “Mark [Rapaport] and I run our company without the involvement of any other third parties.” The almost quarter century Snyder spent as Washington Commanders owner was rife with allegations of mismanagement and sexual misconduct, earning him a reputation as one of the worst owners in professional sports. (Snyder has denied the allegations.)

The Apprentice entered the Cannes Film Festival without a US distributor and, as of now, still does not have one attached. Abbasi, for his part, shrugged off the Trump’s threat at a press conference after the film’s debut—“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people; they don’t talk about his success rate, though, you know?”—before offering to show the film to the ex-president, arguing that he might be “surprised” by it. Vanity Fair has reached out to the film’s team for additional comment.