“The Apprentice,” a new movie that dramatizes the early years of Donald Trump’s career, ends with a scene between Mr. Trump and an actor who plays me. The year is 1986 and I’m interviewing Mr. Trump for the first time, to begin ghostwriting “The Art of the Deal,” a book that I view today as an unintended work of fiction.

Since my time collaborating with Mr. Trump, I’ve spent my adult life studying, writing about and working with leaders and other high achievers. I’ve focused especially on how their early childhood experiences have influenced their adult lives — mostly unconsciously — and on exploring the often vast gulf between how they present themselves on the outside and how they feel on the inside. Mr. Trump, for me, has always been Exhibit A.

Watching “The Apprentice” crystallized two big lessons that I learned from Mr. Trump 30 years ago and that I’ve seen play out in his life ever since with more and more extreme consequences. The first lesson is that a lack of conscience can be a huge advantage when it comes to accruing power, attention and wealth in a society where most other human beings abide by a social contract. The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.

“The Apprentice” tells Mr. Trump’s story through the lens of the two men who most influenced him: his father, Fred, and Roy Cohn, his longtime lawyer and one of the most notorious and disgraced fixers of the 20th century. What they had in common, and passed on to Donald in spades, was their shamelessness when it came to winning and dominating others, whatever that took. The end always justified the means.

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The film starts with a disclaimer that some events have been “fictionalized for dramatic purposes,” and the filmmakers clearly took artistic liberties. Journalists, historians and critics can debate which specific scenes in “The Apprentice” actually happened and which ones did not. For me, the movie felt emotionally true — and consistent with the Donald Trump I came to know three decades ago. “The Apprentice” is less about how Mr. Trump rose to power than it is about the generational impact of his family’s trauma and dysfunction, and how it shaped the person Mr. Trump became and the impact he’s had on an entire country.

During my time working on “The Art of the Deal,” Mr. Trump would call me most evenings from his Trump Tower apartment, and nearly every call began the same way. “Can you believe it, Tony?” he asked, rhetorically. “Bigger than ever.” Then he would go on to talk about some triumph he’d had that day or a hapless competitor he’d vanquished.

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