In The Apprentice’s skin-deep world, plastic surgery is a bigger sin than rape

Spoiler Space offers thoughts on, and a place to discuss, the plot points we can’t disclose in our official review. Fair warning: This article features plot details of The Apprentice.

In The Apprentice, Donald Trump is once again a rapist. There’s no need to shy away from that. He doesn’t have ”intense sex” with his then-wife Ivana, like some who have covered Ali Abbasi’s new movie have claimed. He throws her on the ground and rapes her. It’s clear—so clear that it’s what allegedly sent the studio (and Trump donor/accidental Apprentice investor Dan Snyder) into fits. And yet, laying the groundwork for these confused misinterpretations, it’s all but brushed aside in the film. Rather, this skin-deep takedown of the ex-president and his unblinking mentor Roy Cohn frames its true gotcha moment in a final scene: Trump getting plastic surgery to make him less fat and less bald, shown in all its gory medical detail.

A generous reading of this choice would be that The Apprentice prioritizes what Trump himself cares about, underlined every time star Sebastian Stan stops to meticulously arrange his blonde bird’s nest. This is a man who has been found liable in court for sexual abuse (Is he a rapist? A judge says that claim is “substantially true.”) and pushed forward as if nothing had happened. This is a surface-level man, so Abbasi goes after his literal image. You can even see this in what directly precedes the rape scene, when Ivana (Maria Bakalova) gives him a book about the G-spot then, rebuffed, insults his appearance. “You have a face like a fucking orange,” she says. “You’re getting fat, you’re getting ugly, and you’re getting bald.” Bald. This last barb is depicted as the final straw, an SNL-level sore spot as cartoonishly provoking as Marty McFly being called “chicken.”

It’s this kind of self-congratulatory simplicity that makes The Apprentice feel so hollow. The takeaway here isn’t that Trump violently raped his wife, but that he’s a shallow and thin-skinned loser who doesn’t know how to fuck. Not that its target isn’t shallow. Trump surely is. But so is Abbasi’s film. 

Trump and his family are racist, so The Apprentice has a random Black man stand up at a city planning meeting to tell us so. Cohn, a closeted bigot who died of AIDS (as famously depicted in Angels In America), is a hypocrite, so The Apprentice has Trump peep Cohn getting railed at a party. But their racism and hypocrisy and greed and shallowness have actual tangible effects on the world and the people in it, something The Apprentice stops short of acknowledging. Perhaps this is why it’s weathered critiques of not taking sides, or overly humanizing its characters. It’s not that the film’s stance on Trump and Cohn is ambivalent or unclear or too human, it’s that it doesn’t have the guts or scope to actually grapple with what they did.

The rape scene is perhaps the most glaring example of this. The account of the rape was first documented in Harry Hurt III’s book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives Of Donald J. Trump, which sources it from “a copy of [Ivana’s] sworn divorce deposition, from 1990, in which she stated that, the previous year, her husband had raped her in a fit of rage.” The book ended up including a non-denial denial from Ivana—“Mr. Trump and I had marital relations in which he behaved very differently toward me than he had during our marriage. As a woman, I felt violated, as the love and tenderness, which he normally exhibited towards me, was absent. I referred to this as a ‘rape,’ but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”—and she later recanted her sworn testimony during Trump’s first presidential run. But what she recanted was so specific and harrowing that it’s hard to interpret it as anything but “literal.”

Hurt’s book places the scalp reduction surgery before the rape. Ivana even recommended the plastic surgeon. Trump was enraged that the operation to help hide his bald spot was more painful than he’d expected, and attacked his wife, tearing off her clothes, holding back her arms, yanking out handfuls of hair from her head, and raping her. Ivana ran upstairs after, hiding behind a locked door and crying for the rest of the night. The next day, she emerges and returns to the scene. “As she looks in horror at the ripped-out hair scattered all over the bed, [Trump] glares at her and asks with menacing casualness: ‘Does it hurt?’” Hurt writes.

The Apprentice’s script, written by political reporter Gabriel Sherman, doesn’t just remove the horrific detail and the terror of its victim, but reverses the motivations. In the film, Trump’s vanity is the immediate trigger for violence. In reality, the violence and vanity are intertwined and ever-present. Sherman focuses on his ego, Hurt on his vindictive cruelty. The Apprentice’s rape is an wounded reaction; the one described by its survivor is one of pure retribution. One version is certainly easier to film, and comes punctuated with a facile punchline: When finished, Trump asks, “Did I find your G-spot?”

And it was almost even worse. Vulture reports that it the scene “was not written as a rape” initially. Instead, “the early parts of the scene featured no sex but rather a physical altercation after Ivana ridicules Trump for having undergone a surgical treatment for baldness. The sequence later transitioned to ‘rough’ but consensual sex in a bedroom.” Others in the same report, though, push back on this, saying that the earlier drafts were “considerably more violent” and included more details from the deposition, like Trump tearing out Ivana’s hair.

Whether it was toned down, or brought closer to the violent reality, the end result sticks closely to the rest of the movie’s ethos: take the easy win, then move on. Trump’s history of sexual violence gets namechecked while The Apprentice scores another potshot at its potbellied target. In a movie that only barely gets beneath the skin of its central figures, liposuction pumps and scalp staples represent its sharpest weapons.