Former President Trump is slamming “The Apprentice,” calling the film about his early rise in New York “fake and classless.”
“It’s a cheap, defamatory, and politically disgusting hatchet job, put out right before the 2024 Presidential Election, to try and hurt the Greatest Political Movement in the History of our Country,” Trump wrote in an early Monday morning Truth Social post.
“The Apprentice” marked its opening weekend Friday, with a release in 1,740 U.S. theaters. The movie brought in just $1.6 million in ticket sales, according to the Associated Press, landing it in 10th place at the box office.
“So sad that HUMAN SCUM, like the people involved in this hopefully unsuccessful enterprise, are allowed to say and do whatever they want in order to hurt a Political Movement, which is far bigger than any of us,” the 45th president wrote.
Sebastian Stan plays a young Trump in the movie, which follows his beginnings as a New York real estate developer alongside his former attorney and mentor Roy Cohn, played by “Succession’s” Jeremy Strong.
In May, an attorney for Trump sent a cease and desist letter to “The Apprentice’s” filmmakers in an attempt to block the movie’s release.
Ali Abbasi, the film’s director, has said there’s “no nice, metaphorical way to deal with the rising wave of fascism” in filmmaking.
“When we did this movie, everyone said, ‘Why would you want to make a movie about Trump? If you want to tell something about the world, do it in a nice way, in a metaphorical way,'” Abbasi said in May.
“There’s only the messy way, there’s only the banal way, is only the way of dealing with this wave on its own terms, at its own level,” he said.