Some insight into where Trump learnt to be Trump.Roy Cohn: The mysterious US lawyer who helped Donald Trump rise to power
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Cohn is best known now for the lessons he taught Trump, but even before that he was an outsized figure running through US politics and culture. To note his most flagrant hypocrisy, Cohn was a gay man who persecuted other gay people out of their government jobs during what became known as the Lavender Scare of the 1950s. Throughout his life, he bullied people and tried to bully facts. He died of Aids in 1986, insisting publicly that he had liver cancer and denying to the end that he was gay, despite taking his lovers along to public events.
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Cohn was, in some ways, brilliant. He was barely into his 20s when, as an assistant prosecutor in 1951, he helped engineer the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as Soviet spies, and acknowledged using illicit, back-channel conversations with the judge to get the death penalty. Soon after, he became notorious as chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy's committee rooting out Communists and supposed Communists from the government.
.In New York during the 1970s and 80s, he partied at the drug-fuelled nightclub Studio 54, and wielded influence as a friend of the famous and powerful, including Barbara Walters, Andy Warhol and Ronald and Nancy Reagan. As a lawyer, he represented clients from Mafia bosses to Trump, and weeks before he died was disbarred for, among several offences, defrauding other clients. He was also well known for his habit of eating off other people's plates, uninvited, even in the poshest restaurants. (Narcissism or just gross table manners? Probably both.)
.His alliance with Trump began in the early 1970s when the US government sued Trump and his father for discriminating against black renters in apartments they managed. Cohn had Trump countersue the Justice Department. The case was settled, and started a litigious pattern that helped define Trump's career in business and later politics. A Washington Post article about Cohn's influence, published during the 2016 presidential campaign, had the headline "The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear", and summed up his lesson as "a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologise". Cohn was also expert at media manipulation.
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Reinforcing Cohn's cultural presence, Trump's question has become a touchstone in recent articles about his legal team, as he faces his first criminal trial in New York. The documentary includes many archival clips of Cohn in the 1950s and beyond. With chilling calm, he boasts on a television talk show in the 1970s that his legal clients are buying what he calls "scare value" because his opponents know that "all sorts of terrible consequences are going to flow" unless they fall into line.
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