Opinion Today: Grasping the truth of Trump

His former ghostwriter weighs in on "The Apprentice."

View in browser|nytimes.com October 14, 2024 By Adam Sternbergh Culture Editor, Opinion Biopics are notoriously tricky: How do you successfully condense a person's life into a few salient scenes and two hours of screen time? Yet it's fair to say that no biopic has ever arrived quite as fraught as "The Apprentice," which opened on Friday. The film depicts the early career of a figure who's not only one of the most polarizing people in America but is also currently running for president: Donald Trump, no stranger to screen time or scrutiny. "The Apprentice" dramatizes Trump's consequential relationship in the 1970s with the notorious (and notoriously ruthless) lawyer Roy Cohn. Any viewer might reasonably wonder of the film (which, for the record, The Times's chief film critic praised) which scenes are historically accurate and which ones reflect artistic license. But the primary question you're likely to ask is: Is the film, in some sense, true? No one can definitively answer that question, save for the film's subject. But Tony Schwartz, who worked closely with Trump while ghostwriting "The Art of the Deal," a best-selling business memoir that was foundational to the Trumpian myth, is better positioned than most. (An actor portrays the character of Tony Schwartz late in the film, when he first met Trump.) In Schwartz's estimation, as detailed in a guest essay published last weekend, the film felt "emotionally true — and consistent with the Donald Trump I came to know three decades ago." He explains exactly why. Trump will long be among the most scrutinized, yet inscrutable, figures of our era. "The Apprentice" is just one artful attempt to unravel that mystery. But it's an effort that, according to one expert witness, successfully grapples with essential truths. Read the guest essay: Sam Whitney/The New York Times Guest Essay I Was Trump's Ghostwriter. A New Biopic Gets the Most Important Thing Right. 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