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Jake Lahut is a political reporter over at the Daily Beast. When he first heard about The Apprentice, the new biopic about Donald Trump, it was a rumor—something he wasn’t sure he was going to be hearing that much more about. “It was presented to me, by the Trump campaign, as an inconvenience,” Lahut said. Over the past few months, he has learned a lot more about this movie. It has a rising young director, Ali Abbasi. Its stars are from the Marvel Cinematic Universe and prestige television. Succession’s Jeremy Strong plays Donald Trump’s mentor, mob lawyer Roy Cohn. In this movie, you see, it’s Trump who is the Apprentice.

“The movie’s basic premise is but for Roy Cohn, Donald Trump would not be this way,” Lahut said. “It’s basically how Trump gets a taste of power and learns how you can get your way in 1970s, 1980s New York through lying, bluster, and below-the-belt tactics.”

Then, last month, came the Cannes Film Festival, where the film debuted. This is when Lahut knew The Apprentice was about to be unavoidable. People who saw it reported a rape scene between Trump and his ex-wife Ivana, also gory scenes of liposuction and a scalp reduction surgery for Trump’s bald spot. After the screening, attorneys for Donald Trump sent a cease-and-desist letter to the movie’s producers, looking to block its distribution. But the filmmakers remained bullish. They invited Trump to watch the film with them. They said they didn’t think he’d dislike the movie, actually.

So far, though, no U.S. company seems willing to take a risk here, which is raising a whole lot of questions. Plenty of other countries will be able to see the film, but it’s not yet coming to America. On a recent episode of What Next, we dug into what’s keeping The Apprentice out of theaters. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Do we know where The Apprentice as a movie came from?

Jake Lahut: This goes all the way back to 2018, when Gabe Sherman had gotten a deal for the screenplay. He’d done a lot of Trump World reporting for Vanity Fair; a lot of stuff on Fox News; and then, especially after his biography of Roger Ailes came out, a lot about the relationship between Trump and Fox News. So, it sounds like this thing is basically in some version of on the shelf in production—talks but not quite there yet. And then, it really starts to pick up momentum when the director, Ali Abbasi, is reported to be joining.

Abbasi has this reputation as a new age filmmaker who is not afraid to take some big swings. The only other people that might have been comparable in this territory would have been the Safdie brothers, who made Uncut Gems. A more intense style of directing and pacing with the storytelling, and that made people........

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