Reporters want to hold powerful people accountable; studio executives want to reach the widest audience, which often means offending as few people as possible. No major Hollywood studio or streamer wanted to finance the film. “Call me if Trump loses,” one top executive said at a cocktail party after he told me how much he loved the script. But even after Trump lost, studios still passed. The January 6 Capitol riot made the subject seem too dangerous.

That meant we would have to finance the movie independently. The model worked like this: Baer would raise most of the production budget by “preselling” rights to distribute the movie in every territory except the United States. An equity investor would provide the rest of the money. We would shoot the movie and show it at a major festival like Cannes, where American distributors would bid to acquire the distribution rights. Baer’s ability to presell to overseas buyers depended on casting stars with big international fan bases to play Trump and Cohn. I wasn’t prepared for actors, many of whom were #Resistance members, to be reluctant about the movie. One turned down the role of Trump saying he didn’t want to give his “humanity” to the president.

In the spring of 2023, we found the final piece of our financing. Abbasi was at Cannes that May promoting his Iranian serial killer film, Holy Spider, when he was contacted by a 29-year-old filmmaker and producer named Mark Rapaport. Rapaport told Abbasi to meet him on a boat. At the harbor, Abbasi found a small motorboat waiting. It didn’t seem promising. But the boat drove him out to a 305-foot yacht. It belonged to Rapaport’s father-in-law: the billionaire (and Trump donor) Dan Snyder. Onboard, Rapaport told Abbasi he wanted to finance the movie. Snyder had loaned Rapaport millions to help grow his production company Kinematics.

At this point you might be asking: Why did Snyder, who donated $1 million to Trump’s 2016 inauguration, allow his money to go into an R-rated movie that depicts Trump as a sex predator? The answer, as best as I can tell, is that Snyder didn’t know what kind of Trump movie his son-in-law was making. (A lawyer who has represented Snyder in the past did not immediately return a request for comment.)

In late March, Abbasi delivered his rough cut to producers. That’s when I became aware of a war playing out between Abbasi and Rapaport over the content of the film. The biggest issue was the sexual assault scene. It dramatized allegations Ivana made in a deposition during her 1990 divorce. (Trump’s lawyers pressured the publishers of Hurt III’s 1993 biography to include an updated statement from Ivana that clarified that when she had used the word “rape” under oath, she didn’t mean Trump assaulted her in a “criminal sense,” only that she felt violated. She fully recanted her sworn testimony when Trump was running for president 25 years later.) Rapaport and his business partner, a former CAA agent named Emanuel Nuñez, told Abbasi the scene was too risky to portray.

Making matters worse, Rapaport screened the rough cut for his father-in-law at his Caribbean vacation home. Every film professional knows rough cuts are difficult to watch for the uninitiated because there’s no music or visual effects and filmmakers take risks to see what works. Abbasi’s first version included an improvised homoerotic dream sequence in which Strong wore a skintight frog costume and climbed into bed with Stan and caressed his face. Snyder eventually walked out of the screening room.

Soon, Rapaport and Nuñez were demanding changes. The frog scene had to go. “I thought it was funny when I was on set… but this is not in the script.”

After Cannes, I remained optimistic that an American company would eventually buy the movie. But every studio and streamer passed. One buyer called it a “complicated movie.” I found the industry’s response deeply dispiriting. Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers, but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency. On a human level, I understood. If you’re a studio executive fearing for your job in a climate of layoffs, do you want to buy a movie that could ignite lawsuits or vindictive regulatory action by the next Trump administration?

In June, we finally found a buyer willing to take the risk. Briarcliff Entertainment made an offer to release The Apprentice in theaters before the election. The small company was founded by Tom Ortenberg, a veteran executive with a track record of distributing commercially successful political films. He previously released Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, Oliver Stone’s W, and Tom McCarthy’s best-picture-winner, Spotlight. Ortenberg didn’t have a lot of money to spend, but he had guts. “Fuck ’em!” he said when I brought up Hollywood’s timidity.