Unemployment Watch #17

The one moment I keep coming back to in my head is the scene after the funeral of Donald Trump's brother, Fred Trump Jr. By this point Trump has almost fully become the narcissistic lunatic we see today. He's fully embraced the lessons Roy Cohn instilled into him; to always attack and never take responsibility for anything, and to never concede defeat even when you have objectively lost. He's become what he believes he needed to be to be successful. In his eyes he's a shark; a Predator.

But for a moment, it all slips away. The night after the funeral he goes into his bathroom, clearly perturbed, and he furiously scrubs his hands, as if he's trying to scrub off his grief over losing his brother. Even though we'd seen prior that he'd joined his father in abusing his older brother, his death has still clearly shook him to his core.

He then goes back to his bed and sits next to Ivana, and the tears start dropping, but he desperately tries to fight them back. Ivana tries to console him, tell him it's okay to cry, but he physically pushes her away, and after a few moments of fighting himself, stopping himself from crying, his face becomes still. The emotion, the pain, the grief, it almost immediately disappears and his expression is alarmingly neutral.

The Apprentice did something I didn't think possible. For a brief, single moment, I felt genuine sympathy for Donald Trump. At the start of the film he doesn't seem like that bad of a guy, but his entire worldview and personality is poisoned by the worst people imaginable, and he becomes the American Monster he is today.

But for a moment, a brief moment, the man he was before almost broke through. Donald Trump shows something resembling humanity. It is however the last time we see it from him. There's no turning back afterwards. The Donald Trump who loved his older brother dies in a single scene.

I've seen a lot of horror films this year, but it's this film that has the most horrific transformation of them all.