It didn’t take long for former President Donald Trump to come out against the biopic about him that was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last week.
The day after the premier of “The Apprentice,” Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called it “malicious defamation” and threatening legal action.
“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Cheung said in a statement to The Hill. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked. 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.”
“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, 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, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Cheung added
Now, Trump’s legal team has fired off a cease-and-desist letter, warning the filmmakers not to seek to distribute the movie in the U.S.
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“The Movie presents itself as a factual biography of Mr. Trump, yet nothing could be further from the truth,” Trump attorney David Warrington worte to the film’s director and screenwriter, Ali Abbasi and Gabriel Sherman, according to The Hill. “It is a concoction of lies that repeatedly defames President Trump and constitutes direct foreign interference in America’s elections.
“If you do not immediately cease and desist all distribution and marketing of this libelous farce, we will be forced to pursue all appropriate legal remedies,” the letter went on, according to the outlet.
“The film is a fair and balanced portrait of the former president,” the film’s producers told Variety in a statement, however. “We want everyone to see it and then decide.”
How “fair and balanced” the movie is remains a matter of come debate, of course. Variety, hardly a bastion of MAGAism, described it as offering “a damning portrait of the former president as ethically compromised.”
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Among other facets of his questionable morality, “The Apprentice” shows Trump working with the mob, refusing to pay contractors, abusing drugs as a weight-loss technique, and — last but certainly not least — raping his first wife, the late Ivana Trump, Variety reported.
The Hill reported that the film had “reportedly received an eight-minute standing ovation” at its Cannes premiere, but was then forced to admit two days later that the film had failed to win even a single award at the prestigious festival.
One of the film’s investors was also reportedly preparing his own cease-and-desist letter to halt the film’s U.S. distribution.
Dan Snyder, former owner of the Washington Commanders and a well-known Trump supporter, apparently expected the film to paint a rosier picture of the former president than it did, according to The Guardian.
Snyder was reportedly “furious” when he saw the film in February, Variety reported earlier this month.
Abbasi said at a news conference in Cannes that he wasn’t concerned about the threatened lawsuit.
“Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” he said, according to Variety.
He also claimed that he thought Trump might like the film if he watched it, but also said at Cannes: “There is no nice, metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism. The messy way, the banal way, is only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level.”
