There’s a new movie about Donald Trump that made its debut at the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. It depicts a young Donald Trump making his way into the New York real estate industry, meeting young, pretty women, and carving out a successful career as a developer and entrepreneur.
If that’s all it was about, it might be worth a look. Alas, it’s a Hollywood picture directed by a guy who said on the red carpet at Cannes, “There is no nice metaphorical way to deal with fascism.” “It’s time to make movies relevant. It’s time to make movies political again,” the director, Ali Abbassi said.
What better way for the left to “make movies political again” than to resurrect the ghost of the left-wing bête noire for the last 75 years, Roy Cohn?
Cohn is not the focus of the film. The movie takes every rumor, every barstool scuttlebutt ever told about Trump and dramatizes it. Did Trump commit marital rape against his wife Ivana? Did he take uppers to lose weight?
The film “presents a damning portrait of the former president as an ethically compromised, philanderer who stiffs contractors and cuts deals with the mob to get his buildings completed.”
“The film is a fair and balanced portrait of the former president,” the producers of the film said in a statement. “We want everyone to see it and then decide.”
Trump disagreed.
“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,” Steven Cheung, Trump campaign communications director, said in a statement.
The movie is certainly explosive. It portrays Trump as a striver, who falls under Cohn’s influence as he struggles to deal with a racial discrimination lawsuit from the Justice Department over how his family real estate business treats Black applicants for its apartment complex. There’s a lot in here that should upset Trump and his supporters. He’s depicted raping Ivana, abusing amphetamines in order to lose weight (then getting tummy tug with a hair implants chaser), and cutting deals with underworld figures so Trump Tower can move forward as planned. He also fails to pay bills and makes a bad bet on a Jersey City casino (so much for “The Art of the Deal”). There’s also a scene where Cohn grips Trump’s leg suggestively under the table that may not play so well at the Mar-a-Lago screening room.
Somehow, Hollywood never gets around to making films that portray Democratic presidents in anything but a saintly light. Meanwhile, Republicans, like Ronald Reagan, are portrayed as pathological warmongers.
At a press conference in Cannes for “The Apprentice,” Abbasi responded to Trump’s legal threats. “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people — they don’t talk about his success rate though, you know?” he said. He also offered to screen the movie for Trump, saying, “I don’t necessarily think that this is a movie he would dislike.”
He’s not serious, of course. That’s pure Hollywood snark. But it reveals a cloying need for even the target of his worthless biopic to approve of his work.
The film received an eight-minute standing ovation at Cannes.