I recently saw the movie "The Apprentice" about the relationship between Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who was involved in many of the mid-20th century's most high-profile political events. I don't know that the film told me anything I didn't already know but it did remind me of just how vicious Cohn was and how much Trump loved that about him. He learned his lessons well. The thru line between Cohn's nefarious career and Trump's own ruthlessness is set to manifest in this second term. It's almost as if it's all coming full circle.

Cohn's first big splash in national politics took place when he was only 23 years old. He was one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He was so well-liked by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he recommended Cohn to be the lead counsel for Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt. (McCarthy had launched his famous crusade in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950, by waving around a piece of paper that he claimed held the names of 205 communists in the U.S. State Department and his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was off to the races.)

Cohn soon became a household name and was known as the "subcommittee's real brain" according to Time Magazine. He and McCarthy instigated a massive investigation and purge of government employees whom they accused of being communists or outed as homosexuals. (The latter was especially cruel on Cohn's part since he was gay himself.) This was the second Red Scare, the first having occurred in the years after WWI, but the focus on expelling people from the government, including the military, on thin........

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