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Understanding Donald Trump 101 – Start with Roy Cohn [1]
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Date: 2025-01-11
In a few days, Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated for his second term in office. Even those who clearly remember the chaos of his first term are on tenterhooks as we try to determine what Trump 47 will be like. His late night social media rants are all over the map, in come cases quite literally, and his cabinet and other staffing picks cast dark shadows over the future course of democracy and common sense in the United States. Frankly, it’s doubtful that even Trump’s hardcore supporters truly know which way he’s apt to bounce, because like a pachinko ball, he caroms off things at the oddest angles, and other than his ego, propensity for not being truthful, and vengefulness, it’s hard to know what he’ll do in any given situation.
There is, however, a historical clue to the personality of the man who is poised to lead the most chaotic presidential administration in living memory, and that’s his long relationship with one of the most controversial and polarizing figures of the mid-twentieth century, the late Roy Marcus Cohn.
Understanding the history of Cohn, who was Trump’s attorney and mentor for decades, opens a doorway into Trump’s often mercurial personality.
Born in the Bronx, New York, on February 20, 1927, in a wealthy Jewish family, Cohn’s father, Albert Cohn , was assistant district attorney in Bronx County and later appointed as a judge in the appellate division of the New York Supreme Court. Cohn graduated from Columbia University School of Law at the age of 20. He was admitted to the bar in New York after he turned 21, and became a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of new York.
Cohn rose to prominence in the 1950s, and gained a reputation as a ruthless prosecutor for his role in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of spying for the Soviet Union and executed. Subsequent historians have questioned the outcome of this case and pointed to possible prosecutorial misconduct, including on the part of Cohn. People who knew him as a lawyer have described him, sometimes in unflattering terms, as someone who ‘flouted the rules everyone was required to follow, and who was willing to do anything to win. Shortly before he died, Cohn was disbarred for fraudulently obtaining a signature from a dying client, and his response to the action was to say “I could care less.’
The fact is, though, Cohn cared deeply what people thought of him in private while showing a tough face in public. He doted on his overbearing mother, with whom he lived until she died when he was 40 years old. During his legal career, in addition to being the chief counsel for Senator Joseph McCarthy during his 1950s communist witch hunts, he made headlines going after homosexuals and perverts in the federal government, while making no secret around his friends that he was gay. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984 and died in 1986 from complications, although insisting to the end that he was dying of liver cancer.
Known as one of New York’s most ferocious and cold-hearted lawyers, Cohn included among his clients a number of New York mobsters, such as the Genovese crime family. He became Donald Trump’s lawyer in the 1970s and it’s reported that the two became quite close, sometimes speaking to each other on the phone as often as five times a day. Some of Cohn’s mob-connected clients, such as Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno and Paul Castellano, controlled a lot of New York City’s construction unions, and Trump used construction companies controlled by Salerno and Castellano to construct Trump Plaza and Trump Tower. It’s also alleged that in 1979, Trump used undocumented Polish and South Korean demolition workers who worked alongside union workers of House Wreckers Union Local 95, controlled by the Genovese family, to demolish the Bonwit Teller department store to make way for Trump Tower. He denied knowing this but was fined nonetheless. The case was settled and the agreement was sealed, so there’s no way of knowing how much of the $325,000 fine Trump actually paid.
Cohn represented Trump in a 1970s suit in which Trump was accused of discriminatory practices in his rental units in New York City. In a 1980 interview with New York magazine, Trump said of Cohn, “He’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” and in 2005, he said of Cohn, “He brutalized for you.” It was Cohn who taught Trump to ‘always deny, never settle, always countersue.” People who knew them both say that Trump was deeply influenced by Cohn’s callous world view and under his tutelage, developed his own aggressive personal style. When he was accused of racial discrimination against Black tenants at his Brooklyn rental properties, for example, Cohn advised him to go on the counteroffensive, and he filed a $100-million countersuit against the government for ‘irresponsible’ charges and called the investigators ‘Stormtroopers’ with ‘Gestapo-like’ tactics. The case was settled, and Cohn crowed that it was a ‘victory,’ and predicted that the 27-year-old Trump ‘is going to own New York.” He became Trump’s closest advisor and confidante, writing harsh prenuptial agreements for his marriages and filing an anti-trust suit against the NFL in a widely publicized but unsuccessful attempt to save the fledgling USFL.
There’s much more about Cohn that would curl your hair and curdle your milk, but this should be enough to give anyone an idea of where Trump’s habits come from. Deny everything, deflect all criticism, never take responsibility, always take credit, and use the courts to deflect attention from your unacknowledged shortcomings. Call names, and ignore truth and facts if they’re not to your advantage.
Roy Cohn is dead, but his influence on Donald Trump lives on.
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