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The Hollywood Reporter

Donald Trump Fumes Over “Fake and Classless” Biopic ‘The Apprentice’

Kevin Dolak
2 min read
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Former President Donald Trump is no fan of The Apprentice, and he’s letting the world know about it.

The biopic follows Trump’s early years as he became the real estate tycoon simply known as “The Donald” as he rose to prominence in the 1980s. The feature film opened in roughly 1,700 theaters nationwide and pulled in an anemic $1.6 million in its first weekend. Trump lashed out against the film on Monday after the numbers came in, showing The Apprentice landing in 10th place overall for the weekend.

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“A FAKE and CLASSLESS Movie written about me, called, The Apprentice (Do they even have the right to use that name without approval?), will hopefully “bomb.” It’s a cheap, defamatory and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social, the social media platform he launched and owns.

“MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!,” the GOP hopeful interjected, then added of the new film, “My former wife, Ivana, was a kind and wonderful person, and I had a great relationship with her until the day she died. The writer of this pile of garbage, Gabe Sherman, a lowlife and talentless hack, who has long been widely discredited, knew that, but chose to ignore it. So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us. MAGA2024!”

In the two-hour feature, Sebastian Stan (of the Captain America franchise) portrays Trump as he’s mentored by Roy Cohn, portrayed by Jeremy Strong (Succession), revealing how Cohn shaped the Trump people know today. The film also shows Stan’s Trump falling in love with first wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova) and includes a controversial scene of Trump raping Ivana, which she claimed during their divorce proceedings but later recanted.

Trump’s camp had been pushing to stop the film for months after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. In May, a cease-and-desist letter was sent from Trump’s attorney to The Apprentice director, Ali Abbasi and its screenwriter Gabriel Sherman.

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