Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump in a still from ‘The Apprentice’
| Photo Credit: Briarcliff Entertainment
The depiction of Donald Trump’s early years as a real estate developer in The Apprentice has long been generating headlines, and legal threats. With Sebastian Stan taking on the lead role, Ali Abbasi’s biopic paints Trump in such an unflattering light that his camp has all but threatened to set Hollywood aflame. A standing ovation at Cannes notwithstanding, the film appears to have shaken the former president enough to prompt cease-and-desist letters from his lawyers, rattling sabers in defence of their image-conscious client.
But is parody even effective when it comes to Trump? Is it possible, in 2024, to satirise someone who’s lived as if they’ve been performing satire all along? The form seems to have met its match in a man who has spent decades turning his life into a three-ring circus, often substituting bluster with farce in ways that outstrip anything that shows like Veep or Succession could cook up.
On deaf ears
Satire, by its nature, is designed to ridicule, to hold up a mirror to power and expose its absurdities. Yet, in the age of Trump, satire has frequently fallen flat, not because it lacks precision, but because it can’t outdo reality.
A personality like Trump is something of a post-satire figure. His blend of bravado, crudeness, and reality TV instincts create a persona that seems impervious to the usual tactics of skewering and ridicule. It’s hard to parody a narcissist who’s already a caricature of himself. The Apprentice’s mission — to expose and exaggerate Trump’s flaws for dramatic effect —runs the risk of misfiring, not because the film isn’t well made, but because its subject is already a walking punchline. Why lampoon someone whose own brand of absurdity outpaces all fiction?
Where Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert have played a hand at turning a generation of young adults into political junkies with their scathing, rapid-fire satire of every administration since the Bush era, the talk show hosts’ smirking dissections still felt like they were puncturing something real. Bush, despite his flaws, still existed in a framework that satire could undermine. Trump, on the other hand, thrives on chaos.
President Donald Trump dances after speaking at a campaign rally at Wilmington International Airport
| Photo Credit:
Alex Brandon
Political satire in contemporary America cinema, especially when grappling with figures like Trump, feels less like a triumph and more like a slow capitulation. These attempts come across as toothless and redundant, because they operate within a framework of norms that Trump has already dismantled. Take filmmaker Adam McKay’s brand of satire, as seen in movies like Don’t Look Up or Vice. Critics complained that it is too on-the-nose, blatant in its messaging.
But perhaps subtlety no longer works in a world where blatant absurdity is the norm.
A testament to that absurdity, for instance, is Trump’s constant barrage of tweets, where he seemed to effortlessly out-satirise himself with every post. Whether it was misspelling words (“covfefe”) or launching attacks on his opponents with schoolyard taunts (“Crooked Hillary” and “Sleepy Joe”), or quite literally cheating death in fist-pumping swagger, Trump’s self-caricature was so extreme that comedians struggled to keep up. They didn’t need to exaggerate his rhetoric; they merely repeated it. No wonder Saturday Night Live eventually opted to use direct transcripts from his speeches in their sketches. Parodying the former President was redundant since Trump did the heavy lifting for them.
A persona of the absurd
Herein lies the issue for Trump-era satirists: how can you successfully mock someone who lives so comfortably within his “concepts of a plan”? By now, the game seems rigged. Even Alec Baldwin’s famous portrayal of Trump on SNL, which earned both acclaim and criticism, began to lose its potency the longer Trump remained in the spotlight. Trump, after all, never seemed embarrassed by these performances. He wore the parodies like badges of honour, incorporating them into his own narrative of media victimisation.
Donald Trump is surrounded by U.S. Secret Service agents at a campaign rally
| Photo Credit:
Evan Vucci
All of this suggests that the power of satire may have weakened when faced with the sheer scale of Trump’s persona. It’s not just that he’s hard to ridicule; it’s that satire, when applied to him, no longer seems subversive. Instead of undermining his credibility, satire has often fed into his larger-than-life mythology, making him more invincible, not less.
Satire in Indian cinema, unlike its American counterpart, rarely pierces the political class with the same precision. Here, films are often more than not vehicles for hero-worship or melodrama. Attempts at any political skewering are few and far between. While Bollywood occasionally dips its feet in the genre, the entrenched culture of deifying political figures makes satire unprofitable and risky. Unlike Trump’s self-caricature, Indian politicians tend to cultivate mythic, impenetrable personas, leaving little room for cinema to poke fun without inviting controversy or censorship.
Gone are the days when pseudo-biopics like The Dictator or mockumentaries like The Interview set the gold standard for political satire. The genre has to evolve, but how?
As The Apprentice rolls out across theaters, the film may raise more questions than answers about the role of satire in documenting outsized lives. Trump has long proven that he is impervious to satire. If anything, his ability to laugh off criticism and turn it into spectacle has cemented his brand. And for the ultimate showman, that might be the most dangerous punchline.
Published – October 18, 2024 02:05 pm IST
