Emerging from the Directors Guild of America Theater after the New York premiere of Ali Abbasi’s The Apprentice, I looked up at two of the towers that make up Billionaire’s Row, a stretch of eight super-luxury, super-thin, supertall skyscrapers clustered on and around West 57th Street. Immediately across the street was the newest addition to the posse, 111 West 57th, a towering monument to waste that’s 1,438 feet tall but contains just sixty condos. A few feet to the west is One 57, the tower that started the trend, standing a comparatively diminutive 1,005 feet and made up of ninety-two condos and the flagship outpost of the Hyatt hotel chain. Walking south down 7th Avenue I confronted a midtown Manhattan unrecognizable from the one depicted in The Apprentice’s opening shots of seedy, ’70s New York, traces of the city’s hard-edged reputation evident only in the souvenir shops selling Trump merchandise alongside T-shirts that read things like Fuck You You Fucking Fuck.

Back on my block I encountered a schmuck in an SUV speeding recklessly down the narrow street. As he passed me, he stuck his head out the window and shouted “Hey, I’m walkin’ here!” in my general direction. We were just two avenues west of Times Square, where Dustin Hoffman’s Ratso Rizzo shouts his immortal line as he slams his hand down on the hood a New York City cab in the opening minutes of Midnight Cowboy. It took me a while to dissect what had just happened. The asshole in the SUV was driving; I was walkin’!

The signifiers of Fear City–era New York are increasingly losing their specificity—but they continue to captivate. The Apprentice, a film that begins in New York’s bad old days and follows the city into the flamboyant, gleefully capitalist epoch it has now inhabited for something like four decades, plays to an audience whose familiarity with the former period is inevitably informed by having lived through the latter. Thus the movie’s first half looks like Midnight Cowboy as projected in a second-run Times Square movie palace in the early ’70s, while the second looks like Midnight Cowboy as encountered on a beaten-up VHS tape. (Though cinematographer Kasper Tuxen shot The Apprentice digitally, he and Abbasi sought to match the two types of period stock footage they knew they’d use in the film: 16mm and broadcast video.) The needle drops are unexpected without being stunty. Consumers (“Anti Anti Anti”) screams over images of Donald Trump (Sebastian Stan) strutting angrily down the dirty boulevard, Suicide (“Ghost Rider”) blasts over an orgy at Roy Cohn’s Eastside townhouse, and Baccara (“Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”) offers a theme song for Ivana Trump (née Zelníčková, played endearingly by Maria Bakalova). At the premiere, Jeremy Strong—whose portrayal of Cohn is phenomenal—compared the movie to Philippe Petit walking the tightrope between the towers in 1974.

It’s nearly impossible to make a good narrative film about someone as pervasive as Donald Trump, a man whose deepest flaws are expressed openly and have become a source of admiration to his millions of followers. Unlike his career-remaking presence on TV, Trump’s film roles have been limited to cameos in movies like Zoolander and The Little Rascals. In Home Alone 2, young Kevin runs into Trump in the hallway of the Plaza Hotel and asks him how to get to the lobby. “Down the hall and to the left,” Trump responds, giving Macaulay Culkin a look of kind concern that is impossible to assimilate today. In Woody Allen’s humiliating Celebrity, a journalist asks Trump what he’s up to and he responds, calmly but confidently, that he’s “working on buying St. Patrick’s Cathedral, maybe doing a little rip-down job and putting up a very, very tall and beautiful building.” Trump on film is a signifier of goyishe New York wealth, a person who can crush you or lift you up, somehow above it all and yet always available for comment.

The Apprentice, however, somehow does the impossible, capturing Trump’s rise in a way that is both familiar and new, magnetic and repulsive. It understands that any good Trump story is also a New York story. While occasionally overindulging in signifiers of what is to come—as in the scene where political dirty trickster Roger Stone (Mark Rendall) encourages Trump to run for office one day and gives him a pin bearing Ronald Reagan’s reelection slogan, “Let’s Make American Great Again”—The Apprentice succeeds by invoking the tumultuous time and place it depicts and centering Trump in the frame. When Abbasi took to the mic before the film began, he called our gathering place in the wealthiest stretch of midtown “the scene of the crime.”

Written by the political journalist Gabriel Sherman, The Apprentice tells the comeback story of a man who was never down that low. Trump—whom Stan fully embodies despite looking little like him—spends the film attempting to eclipse his own privileged background as the heir to a Brooklyn and Queens real estate fortune premised on racial exclusion, graft, and state subsidy, and working to become a macher about town in gay Manhattan. (In the film, as in life, Trump is equally drawn to and repulsed by queer Jews, including his mentor, Cohn, and his antagonist, Ed Koch.)

To the extent that Donald needs saving, it is from his father Fred, a cruel and petulant real estate developer who sends his sons out to collect rents and rat on lower-status company employees. Fred’s business has been built on a combination of state subsidy and winking graft, and the midcentury housing policies that transformed the American landscape are, for the family business, ways to make money: exclusionary zoning helps the bottom line in the Trumps’ suburban developments, and “slum clearance” and temporarily price-fixed middle-income development are crucial for the hefty profits they receive from their urban projects. Fred and Donald, we learn, have been served with a federal Fair Housing Act lawsuit by the NAACP. Their discrimination is egregious; they are incredulous. “How can I be a racist,” Fred asks, “when I have a Black driver?” Fred has tried to secure help from his pals in government (Mayor Beame and Governor Rockefeller), but to no avail. By the letter of the law, they’re cooked.

Enter Roy Cohn, peering fixedly at young Donald from across a gilded private club in a long shot that elicited hearty laughter both times I saw the film. “They’re going to force us to rent to welfare cases and the buildings are gonna fall apart,” Donald complains to Roy, who comforts the poor little rich kid. The liberals, he says, are “worse than Nazis.” By the time of the federal lawsuit, the Trumps had been sued and settled out of court for similarly flagrant discrimination at a Cincinnati project where management told prospective Black tenants there were no vacancies. In New York, Trump’s agents steered the vast majority of Black applicants to just one of their projects: Brooklyn’s Patio Gardens.

After some cajoling, Cohn takes the case and becomes Donald’s mentor, imparting in him the horrific charisma and post-liberal worldview that would lead him to unwarranted success in both business and politics. When Donald speaks of the Fair Housing Act, Cohn barks back, “Don’t tell me what the law is, tell me who the judge is.” “This is a nation of men, not laws,” he pronounces later in the film. Cohn’s advice ultimately boils down to three rules, all of which will be painfully familiar to anyone who has followed Trump’s political ascendance (which is to say, everyone watching this movie). Rule 1: Attack. Attack. Attack. Rule 2: Admit nothing. Deny everything. Rule 3: Claim victory and never admit defeat. Follow these rules in all settings, Cohn teaches Trump, and you will never be a loser again.

After acknowledging that the Trumps have no way to win on the merits—and here the facts of the case are even more scandalous than those portrayed in the film—Cohn countersues the feds for $100 million, threatens their staff, and ultimately blackmails a high-level Department of Justice official with photos of his fling with a Cancún cabana boy. “Last I checked, homosexuals were barred from civil service,” Cohn tells the DOJ official, invoking the Lavender Scare he helped perpetuate through his work with Senator Joe McCarthy. The government settles without demanding much in the way of fines or admissions of guilt from the perpetrators.

From there, Donald pivots once and forevermore from defense to offense. His first big move is to purchase the shuddered Commodore Hotel on 42nd Street in order to tear it down and build the Grand Hyatt. Hyatt, however, is not so sure that there is profit to be made on the site. “Between the unions and the taxes, how will you make money?” the company’s co-founder Jay Pritzker asks Donald. Via tax abatement, Trump promises. “They city’s broke and they’re going to forego taxes?” Yes, Trump replies. “I’ve got the City Planning Commission in my pocket.”

And so he does—or rather, Cohn does. Though the hearing gets heated, Cohn ultimately possesses leverage in the form of secret tapes made in his home. These tapes capture all sorts of powerful people in compromising positions, including the Planning Commissioner admitting to having stolen $50,000 from the public trust. Cohn plays his card, and Trump gets his $160 million abatement.

This story may be true, but it is necessarily truncated. The full account, as told by Trump’s greatest muckraking biographers Gwenda Blair (in her multi-generational saga The Trumps) and Wayne Barrett (Trump: The Deals and the Downfall), is even wilder and involves the collapse of the Penn Central Transportation Company, the crisis of the Urban Development Corporation (New York’s short-lived social housing development authority), and the creation of a new, forty-year commercial tax incentive program specifically for this project (later dubbed the Business Incentive Program and offered widely). Barrett called Trump’s Grand Hyatt deal “a breakthrough example of the new state capitalism—public risk for private profit.”

Donald’s next triumph was Trump Tower. We watch as Trump and Cohn pursue a similar subsidy—New York’s 421-a tax exemption for new residential construction—in a City Hall meeting with Mayor Ed Koch, whom they treat as a nebbish nemesis hardly worth their ire. Koch, however, is aghast. “We’re not going give you the tax break. Why would we?” Not a bad question! When Trump tries to sell Koch on all the jobs his project will create, the mayor reminds him (and the audience) of Trump’s record of labor abuses and wage theft. “I can’t let you get rich off the backs of the people of New York and their treasury,” Koch tells Trump. A viewer today knows how this saga will end. The building gets built. The taxes go unpaid.

Once again, the true story is more complicated—and in many ways more inflammatory—than the appropriately abridged version in Sherman’s script. Trump won many concessions to get his signature project built, including not just the tax break but a rezoning, a density bonus for a “privately built public space” (the building’s heavily guarded and commercialized atrium), and a shady agreement to use non-union undocumented immigrant labor—workers who, as Koch predicted, were never paid what they were owed. The full story of the tax break is a classic case of revolving-door politics between the lobbyer and the lobbied. Koch’s commissioner of Housing Preservation and Development, Anthony Gliedman, at first denied Trump’s request for a tax exemption. Trump sued and won. Gliedman, sensing the shifting winds of political and money, quit his government job and went to work for Trump, giving him access to—in the horrified words of columnist Neal Peirce—“which officials to call, or what donation for a subway station, homeless shelter or political campaign might grease the skids for city-development decisions he wants.”

The tax subsidies Trump was granted to build the Grand Hyatt, Trump Tower, and virtually every other building he threw up are now ubiquitous. Hardly any rental development in New York City is built without 421-a, which was created in 1971 to address a budding crisis of capital flight that was stymieing residential development and hastening the departure of the middle and upper classes from the city. Over the course of the preceding twenty-five years, in response to a trifecta of city-planning actions, real-estate rivalries, and local labor and civil rights victories, hundreds of factories had departed New York City for its suburbs, the American South, and the Global South, costing city workers over half a million manufacturing jobs. With the old economy collapsing, politicians looked to real estate and finance to revive the city’s prospects. They became desperate for developers to give a new shape and image to the boarded-up landscape, known to the world for low rents and high crime. Liberal Republican Mayor John Lindsay proposed a program that looked a lot like what Trump would be granted for the Grand Hyatt: without having to meet any criteria for merit or design, builders who brought their business to New York City would be spared any property taxes for decades. Tenant groups protested that developers were throwing up projects that few who currently resided in New York could afford to move into, so the mayor added limits on the rents developers could charge. Within three years, however, those limits were removed: the sky—or the market—was the limit on tax-exempt project rents.

In some sense, the program worked, and Trump became the avatar for its laissez-faire logic. Labor historian Joshua Freeman has written that “the media hailed [Trump] as the embodiment of one of the lessons of the [1975 New York City] fiscal crisis: let the genius of private enterprise replace the morass of government bureaucracy.” When the crisis dissipated—when, in part because of 421-a and similar policies, land and property prices skyrocketed and real estate capital became the leading force in the city’s political economy—421-a was adjusted to mandate some degree of affordable housing for projects located in the most expensive parts of the city (though the cheaper housing was often built off-site in poorer parts of New York). The program changed, but it never disappeared for more than a couple years at a time, while developers and unions periodically renegotiated its terms. In bad times, the subsidy is justified as luring back investment; in good times, it is justified as offsetting rising construction costs.

The Apprentice portrays Trump, avant-garde master of 421-a, as a prophet of neoliberalism. The Grand Hyatt may have been achieved through blackmail, but once Trump and his enablers set the precedent, it became the paradigm still practiced in this city and many others. In the 1970s cities needed money, and rather than pursuing revenue by taxing the rich, many mayors—sometimes grudgingly, sometimes enthusiastically—embraced the idea that it would be better not to tax them outright, and instead inaugurate a race to the bottom between cities for who could create the climate most friendly to the rich (and, almost by definition, most hostile to the poor).

These dynamics are so calcified today as to seem unchangeable. As the architecture critic Owen Hatherley writes in his recent book Walking the Streets/Walking the Projects, the only way many New Yorkers can imagine “housing becoming affordable is through some sort of economic or natural disaster emptying the buildings so that you can squat them.” Disaster seems plausible enough; ending subsidies for luxury developers is preposterous. The Apprentice dramatizes a time when this was not so—when today’s Gramscian commonsense read as Trumpian bullshit (far-fetched, counterintuitive, crazy) and could only be achieved through Cohn’s covert ops.

Throughout the film, Trump equates his imaginary comeback with New York City’s. Confidence in the city means believing with perfect faith that money can and will be made by renting and selling its parts to the highest bidder, often with the active assistance of local government. Trump’s art is not the art of the deal so much as the art of the rent gap, the theoretical difference between what a property commands as it stands versus the amount it will command if it is “improved” (often by evicting tenants, sometimes by tearing it down and replacing it, always by altering it toward the tastes of those with more money than its current occupants).

In The Apprentice’s back half, Trump has achieved what he sought. He is the rising prince of Manhattan real estate and the subject of fawning media coverage. All the major developers are in attendance at his and Ivana’s wedding, and so are the mayor and several city council members. From here, Trump evolves from a bad man to a worse man and takes on many of the mannerisms we now associate with him. His business is starting to flail, but it hardly seems to matter. The film’s focus shifts from Trump’s real estate crimes to his interpersonal crimes: raping his wife for daring to exist, declining to help his brother as he descends into suicidal despair, pushing Cohn away and evicting Cohn’s partner as they both succumb to HIV/AIDS. Trump’s moral descent coincides with his economic ascent.

The audience at the New York premiere was clearly ready to see Trump’s story told in this sequence.  Before the lights dimmed, as I sat in my press corner doing my Yiddish homework, I noted Trump’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen selfieing and gladhanding. People were dressed in outfits I never see in the wild, from a child in classic prep school khakis and blazer to a woman in a shimmering sequined evening gown. After the film, Abbasi—tactfully avoiding calling the audience out directly—focused on the class affinities of Trump’s enablers and identified American capitalism as the true subject of his film. He refuses, he told the crowd, to see Republicans as bad guys and Democrats as good guys, not only because that makes for a boring story, but because in his experience as a child in Iran, they were both terrible for him and his countrymen.

This was more than just canny marketing. Though Trump has reshaped the Republican Party in his image, he was not an especially partisan figure in his early years. The New York he benefited from—and which he helped instantiate—was bipartisan. Fred Trump was close with Democrat Abe Beame and Republican Nelson Rockefeller; Donald Trump supported both Democrat Mario Cuomo and Republican Rudy Giuliani. In today’s New York, real estate affinities transcend party affiliation. One57, the supertall across from the DGA Theater, began construction and received a 421-a abatement worth $62.5 million under Michael Bloomberg but was completed under Bill de Blasio, who maintained his predecessor’s support for the program and actively lobbied in Albany for its renewal.

If The Apprentice delivers some pleasurable grime and disrepute in its portrait of New York in the pre-abatement era, the New York we see taking shape over the course of the film is utterly contemporary. What Trump and Cohn achieved behind closed doors is now done openly and celebrated as enlightened planning policy. What investors laughed at as far-fetched is now not only demanded but expected by anyone seeking to make money off of property in New York and many other cities across the country and around the world. In this respect, as The Apprentice makes clear, Donald Trump transformed America long before he ever decided to run for President.

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