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To understand the differences between Donald Trump’s somewhat restrained first term and the outrageous abuses of his second, you need to appreciate the long afterlife of the president’s late mentor.

Roy Marcus Cohn was the kingmaker from hell. An odious man born of an odious mother—Dora Cohn was “mean, vicious, ugly, and foul-mouthed,” one family member said—Cohn was an only child spoiled shamelessly by his doting heiress mom. Dora created “a person who was totally free of the rules that you and I or most people go by,” one of Cohn’s law partners later said.

To understand the differences between Donald Trump’s somewhat restrained first term and the outrageous abuses of his second, you need to appreciate the long afterlife of the president’s late mentor.

Roy Marcus Cohn was the kingmaker from hell. An odious man born of an odious mother—Dora Cohn was “mean, vicious, ugly, and foul-mouthed,” one family member said—Cohn was an only child spoiled shamelessly by his doting heiress mom. Dora created “a person who was totally free of the rules that you and I or most people go by,” one of Cohn’s law partners later said.

A brilliant lawyer who graduated Columbia Law School at age 20, Cohn brought that vicious sensibility to the national stage in an extraordinary career of political skullduggery. It was a career that extended from McCarthyism in the 1950s—Cohn was the brains behind that American Inquisition—to mentoring dirty-trickster extraordinaire Roger Stone during the Ronald Reagan era to Cohn’s molding of an ambitious boy builder named Donald Trump in 1970s New York.

American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, Kai Bird with Susan Goldmark, Scribner, 528 pp., $32, September 2026

Cohn’s brutish course through the corridors of power was, to a large extent, a template for Trump’s later on. In their new book American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey From Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump, biographer Kai Bird and his wife and chief researcher, Susan Goldmark, tell the long, sordid tale of how one “narcissistic con artist”—as they characterize Cohn—did so much to create another, the man who now occupies the most powerful office in the world.

Trump and Cohn were blood brothers of the political netherworld. Born to wealthy New York families, indulged endlessly by their parents, the two shared a common sense of entitlement and a dearth of morality. Neither man really believed in anything except his own aggrandizement. Their anti-establishment populism was “purely opportunism,” Bird and Goldmark write.

Most of the familiar tactics we have seen Trump use in his rise to political power sprang out of Cohn’s playbook, the authors contend. Among them: lie to the public relentlessly and without fear of contradiction; deny unflattering facts and drown them out with strident counterclaims; never admit error or defeat; goad and threaten your political enemies constantly; threaten to sue offending press outlets; never leave a paper trail; and always counterattack by accusing the accuser. Above all, never apologize.

Trump even adopted the practice of belittling political opponents with cruel nicknames, employed by Cohn and his former boss, U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy. Just as Cohn and McCarthy sought “to establish McCarthyism as Republicanism,” in the words of C.D. Jackson, an aide to then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Trump has done pretty much the same with what is now called Trumpism, remaking his party’s ideology top to bottom in his image. And like Cohn, who was indicted several times in his life, accusations of financial corruption swirl around Trump.

Donald Trump with attorney Roy Cohn in 1984.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

“Roy Cohn not only mentored Donald Trump, but in many ways Roy Cohn was Donald Trump,” said veteran journalist Steven Brill, who covered both men in New York in the 1970s and ’80s. “Trump’s phrases are all Cohn’s phrases.”

It is a useful bit of perspective to have at the moment. Because what we are seeing today, in Trump’s second term, is effectively an administration full of Roy Cohns.

In contrast to his first term, as Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan document in another new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, Trump has filled his cabinet with slavishly obsequious loyalists. And most of them seem willing, in Cohn-like fashion, to promote any lie, take out any enemy, and break any law that he desires.

In August, Trump managed to muscle Todd Blanche, his devoted personal attorney, through Senate confirmation as U.S. attorney general. As a result, Trump will likely be served by the most Cohn-ish apparatchik of them all—one........

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