A Cabinet Full of Roy Cohns
Trump’s longtime mentor is the true father of the president’s second-term abuses, a new book posits.
The current administration finds itself populated with individuals who bear a striking resemblance to the infamous Roy Cohn. In their book, American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, biographers Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark paint a vivid portrait of Cohn's long and nefarious career. As a brilliant lawyer who graduated from Columbia Law School at just 20 years old, Cohn brought his own brand of political manipulation to the forefront in his extraordinary career.
From McCarthyism in the 1950s, to mentoring Roger Stone during the Reagan era, and finally molding Donald Trump in the 1970s, Cohn's influence was undeniable. The authors argue that the administration's approach to politics, filled with lies, denials, and threats, echoes Cohn's playbook to a frightening degree. Just as Cohn and his former boss, Senator Joe McCarthy, sought to establish McCarthyism as a defining aspect of Republicanism, Trump has done the same with what is now known as Trumpism.
The roster of Trump's cabinet, filled with loyalists willing to do his bidding by any means necessary, is reminiscent of Cohn's own entourage. The sordid tale of Cohn's life, marked by his relentless pursuit of self-aggrandizement and disregard for morality, serves as a cautionary tale for the Trump administration. The consequences of Cohn's tactics, now fully realized in the form of an administration filled with Roy Cohns, remain to be seen.
Written by urgent.news from Foreign Policy's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
