Somewhere, Roy Cohn Is Smiling

At this point in the Trumpian arc, we're all too familiar with the president's methods: Deny everything; apologize for nothing. Hog the spotlight. Counterattack, counterpunch, countersue. Always declare victory, even when you lose (especially when you lose). Resentment sells. Nativism sells. Cruelty, if not yet normal, becomes the norm. Rules and traditions are for suckers; everyone is, if not corrupt, at least corruptible. These are President Trump's instincts, yes. But before they were his, they were Roy Cohn's. Kai Bird's new book, 'American Scoundrel,' written with Susan Goldmark (Bird's wife and chief researcher), is a biography of Cohn, the sinister 20th-century lawyer who served as chief counsel to Joe McCarthy when the junior senator from Wisconsin was Red Scaring America and as lawyer to Trump when the young real estate developer was deflecting allegations of discrimination against prospective Black tenants. 'American Scoundrel' is very much a how-we-got-here book, showing how Cohn's guile, paranoia and shamelessness guided McCarthy, rubbed off on Trump and stuck fast to America. The day after winning the 2016 election, Trump was on the phone with Roger Stone, his friend and adviser and longtime Cohn ally. 'Wouldn't Roy love to see this moment?' the president-elect said wistfully of Cohn, who died in 1986. 'Boy, do we miss him.' And just months later, when the president fumed that Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, was failing to protect him, an irate Trump demanded, 'Where's my Roy Cohn?' If he really wanted to find Cohn, all Trump had to do was look in the mirror. The Cohn-Trump parallels are evident on nearly every page of 'American Scoundrel,' so much so that Bird barely needs to point them out. From a young age, for example, Cohn traded on the influence of his father, a New York judge, much as Trump would lean on the wealth and connections of his own father, Fred Trump. At 16, Cohn got one of his high school teachers out of a traffic ticket by calling the police precinct — 'I'm sure you know who my father is' — and later relied on paternal clout to secure a job as an assistant U.S. attorney in New York. Cohn became obsessed with publicizing his accomplishments — 'I didn't count it as winning if the world didn't know about it' — and cultivated gossip columnists to stay in the headlines. (Not that he needed much help: Cohn's role in the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg established his name in legal and anti-Communist circles, even before his work for McCarthy made him a national figure.) To Cohn, 'personal loyalty was everything,' Bird writes, and his disregard for legalities was captured in his maxim 'Don't tell me the law. Tell me the judge.' He was even terrible at paying his bills, 'another lesson Trump learned from Cohn,' Bird writes. Like his protégé, Cohn was indicted several times and was constantly under I.R.S. audit. At his birthday party in 1980, friends presented Cohn with a cake featuring his own scowling visage. (No word if T-shirts were available.) People who knew both men recognized that some of Trump's verbal tics — 'if you want to know the truth' and 'I can tell you' — trace back to Cohn. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.