In an American Chronicles article from the New Yorker of August 10, Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark write a devastating short bio of Roy Cohn, entitled “The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything.”
Knowing whatever I do know about both Cohn and Trump, I am amazed at how shocking the article is, even now, how thoroughly rotten Cohn was and how thoroughly he trained his devoted and utterly pliable pet beast.
Then I came to something Sam Roberts, who covered New York City politics for the Daily News (he’s now at the New York Times), said about Roy Cohn in the 2019 documentary, Where’s My Roy Cohn? I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a stunning, compact indictment of any public figure:
Roy was a master of situational immorality…He had rules about how to exercise power….You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Roy Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.