Trump’s mentor, Roy Cohn, poisoned American culture. Will we ever recover? – The Boston Globe
The senator couldn’t have known how right he was.
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s new book on Cohn, “American Scoundrel,” makes no bones about the throughline from its subject to the current US president, starting with its subtitle: “Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump.” Bird, who won a Pulitzer for his J. Robert Oppenheimer biography “American Prometheus,” and Goldmark, his wife and chief researcher, detail Cohn’s Svengali-like influence over his protégé as he helped Trump become a ruthless New York real estate power. As they write, “McCarthy, Cohn, and Trump used their political resentments to tap into raw populist emotions that have long festered in American society. All three were serial fabulists, shamelessly making up stories to stoke tabloid headlines. They uncorked political resentments against immigrants, intellectuals, scientific expertise, feminists, and most particularly, Black and any non-white minorities.” If we are living in the age of Trump, we are also undoubtedly living in the shadow of Cohn.
But if Cohn’s defeat back in 1954 was only temporary, what about the crowning victory he didn’t live to see? If politics swing to and fro like a pendulum, will the next swing repudiate the gospel of Cohn? Or has the evil genie escaped so far out of the bottle that we can never squeeze it back in?
Cohn was born in 1927 in the Bronx to a doting, narcissistic mother and a father who used his connections as a judge to curry favor with everyone from labor leaders to mob bosses. By his early twenties Roy counted Frank Costello, the Luciano family crime boss, as a friend and business associate, and he would later use his mob connections to help Trump build his New York real estate holdings. He rose to fame prosecuting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and he celebrated when they were convicted of espionage and put to death in the electric chair.
Power was his drug, blackmail and intimidation his stock in trade. He learned early, as the authors note, that “he could always bend the rules, so long as he had the right connections.” Those connections included all-powerful figures like Walter Winchell, the bare-knuckle columnist with a similar thirst for blood, and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, who never met a wiretap he didn’t like. Cohn had an uncanny instinct for using or making up information to destroy people, and whenever he seemed to be finished, he emerged again like a determined cockroach, emboldened by criticism, impervious to facts, and hungry for revenge. Yes, this should sound familiar.
By the time Cohn met Trump, in the early ’70s, the future president was in a tight spot. The federal government was suing his father Fred Trump’s real estate company for discriminating against Black renters. Cohn was drawn to the younger Trump — his brash demeanor, his blond good looks — and he took him on as a favorite client. Cohn insisted the Trumps countersue and hold up proceedings for as long as possible, and then publicly declare victory where none existed. Cohn taught Donald Trump his three rules of winning — attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and always claim victory — that he would one day apply to running the most powerful country on the planet. It’s no exaggeration to argue that the catastrophic belligerence and lack of reason and empathy that now define the United States’ relationship to most of the world stems from an opportunistic Bronx fixer.
Cohn fascinates not merely because he was powerful, or evil, but because he seems to have made a bargain with the devil. Proudly Jewish, he saved some of his most vehement attacks for other Jews, including the Rosenbergs. He was gay, and anyone who knew him well knew this, but machismo was a key part of his persona, and he denied he had AIDS until the day he died of its complications in 1986. He had a brilliant legal mind that he used to crush anyone who got in his way. He could have been a Shakespearean villain.
Playwrights and filmmakers seem to realize this; the best Cohn-related projects are more interested in humanizing him than painting a caricature. In the dazzling 2003 HBO miniseries adaptation of Tony Kushner’s play “Angels in America,” set in 1985, Al Pacino’s Cohn is vicious, bullying, but also unmistakably lonely and very much aware of his own mortality. When his doctor (James Cromwell) tells him he has AIDS, Cohn initiates the liver cancer ruse with alarming directness and self-loathing. In short: Homosexuals get AIDS. Homosexuals have no power in society. Therefore, I have liver cancer. And if you tell anyone otherwise, I will destroy your life and career.
More recently, in the 2024 movie “The Apprentice,” Jeremy Strong plays Cohn as he teaches Trump (Sebastian Stan) how to use his three rules to skirt civil rights housing laws and build the ultimate monument to self, Trump Tower. The film pulls off a seemingly impossible trick: In showing how Trump all but tossed his mentor aside as he grew ill and faced disbarment for unethical, unprofessional, and dishonest conduct, it actually makes you feel sorry for Roy Cohn.
Cohn was friendly with Nixon (no stranger to dirty tricks) and with Reagan, but Trump is the first president to fully embody Cohn’s view of politics as an anything-goes blood sport. There has never been a more litigious president or one who so nakedly values power and winning over democracy. American political discourse has never been so coarse, warlike, or juvenile. When the Trump White House posts, say, an animated video depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and then laughs it off as a harmless prank, you can feel Cohn’s influence. Former presidents might tacitly condone such toxicity from others; now it comes directly from the highest office in the land.
Is there any fixing what has been broken? Are we now permanently ensconced in the House That Roy Built? Michelle Obama’s insistence on dignity — “When they go low, we go high” — hasn’t worked so well in the age of disinformation, hot takes, and social media, an age of discord that Cohn would surely savor. More politicians are inclined to fight fire with fire these days, including Gavin Newsom, the outgoing California governor and presumed presidential hopeful, who has gleefully attacked Trump by borrowing the style of his over-the-top, all-caps social media rants. It is, after all, hard to counter a schoolyard bully with a polite word and reasonable argument.
Our best hope for washing off the Cohn-like stain on American politics might lie in younger generations who recognize how abnormal and destructive the rhetoric of chaos gets when it threatens national and international stability. Trump, after all, isn’t some crafty New York fixer. He’s the president of the United States. When he attacks and denies and claims that every embarrassment is a victory, the repercussions are felt around the world. And somewhere from beyond, Roy Cohn nods in approval at his prize student.
Chris Vognar can be reached at chris.vognar@globe.com. Follow him on Instagram at @chrisvognar and on Bluesky at chrisvognar.bsky.social.