How to remove the most recent post from $the_query

If you need to skip the current post, you can make use of the offset parameter. The value passed will the amount of posts to skip, so in your case, you would do

'offset' => 1,

to skip the latest post.

Just a note on offset, when you add offset to any query, it breaks pagination. WP_Query internally uses offset to calculate pagination. If you need to page that specific query, you will need to manually calculate pagination