There are few things — brands — that Donald Trump has been involved with that haven’t failed. But one, his show The Apprentice, stood the test of time.

That’s not necessarily because of his involvement. It could just have been the director, Ali Abbasi, who made the show memorable enough to overcome the stigma of having starred Donald Trump.

His former director has now made a biographical movie about him with the same name as the show. It got an eight-minute standing ovation when it premiered at Cannes earlier this week. Trump’s frontman, Stephen Cheung, has vowed that Team Trump plans to sue.

“We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Cheung said. “This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked. As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate.”

All of this comes because the film depicts Trump in a very unflattering light: As a domestic abuser, as an opportunistic man who unceremoniously dumped everyone in his life who was no longer of use to him.

It even depicts his alleged rape of his ex-wife (now dead) Ivana, who swore that he raped her in their divorce deposition 34 years ago.

Ivana, who was married to Donald from 1977 until their 1990 divorce, once accused him of raping her in the late ’80s during their divorce proceedings, as The Daily Beast reported in 2015. She later recanted this statement in 1993, stating at the time that while she “felt violated” she did “not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”

In a 2015 statement about it, Ivana — who died in 2022 at 73 — said, “The story is totally without merit. Donald and I are the best of friends and together have raised three children that we love and are very proud of.”

But legal expert David Ring, an LA civil trial lawyer, says that Trump has little chance of success if he does sue. That’s not because he’s lost every lawsuit he’s been involved in, because the burden of proof would be entirely on him.

“Trump is the ultimate public figure and would have to show blatant outrageous falsehoods in the story and that the creators intended to lie about Trump and knew they were lying about Trump’s background. The First Amendment grants a lot of leeway for people to write about or make movies about public figures like Trump. They are allowed to use artistic license,” he said.

If the suit is for defamation, then Trump has to prove both that the things depicted are false AND that the filmmaker intended to cause him public harm.

“They cannot, however, just make things up. The Apprentice biopic sounds like it is based on more than sufficient facts such that it will be lawsuit-proof. Trump can certainly threaten a lawsuit, and he can even file a lawsuit, but it will be a loser at the end of the day.”

Trump, meanwhile, was just ordered to pay nearly a hundred million dollars for defaming another woman he raped. He won’t even take the stand in his current criminal trial — let’s see how he thinks he’ll fare in his next civil one, if it comes.