Roy Cohn, the infamous lawyer-cum-thug who once represented celebrities, politicians, mobsters and Donald Trump, has long held a special place in the president’s heart.

“You know how many lawyers in New York represent organized-crime figures?” Trump noted during an interview in 1997 after I asked him about his relationship with Cohn. “Does that mean we’re not supposed to use them?”

The president was willing to overlook Cohn’s shortcomings because he provided a valuable service, Trump told me when we revisited the subject in another interview eight years later. “Roy was brutal, but he was a very loyal guy. He brutalized for you.”

Trump has searched for new brutalizers ever since Cohn’s death in 1986, especially when he’s landed in a tight corner. After former Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from overseeing a federal investigation into Trump’s possible intersections with Russians attempting to sabotage the 2016 presidential election, the president fretted no one knew how to run interference for him. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he complained, according to the New York Times.

So it’s tempting to identify a Cohn proxy at each turn of Trump’s two White House tours. Everyone from Bill Barr and Michael Cohen to Rudy Giuliani and Stephen Miller have been trotted out over the years as Trump’s new consigliere. The comparisons are descriptive, of course, and even useful, but not entirely apt.

Cohn was an unusually predatory and corrupt abettor who openly consorted with criminals. However wayward, unlawful or brutish Trump’s Cohn stand-ins have been, they haven’t fully measured up to the original. The lesson in all of this, though, isn’t that Trump can’t find his........

© Bloomberg