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We Are Living Under Roy Cohnian Logic

The political fixer created a career for himself as a self-promoting, ubiquitous hustler. Like Trump, he got away with it by having the right friends.

Most New Yorkers, if they remember the name at all, curse the distant memory of Roy Cohn. He died a miserable death from AIDS just 40 years ago, but his ghost has been haunting Americans over the past decade. Back in the 1970s and ’80s, Cohn mentored our current president and taught him his tricks. He molded Donald Trump into both the worst and the most consequential politician of our time. He took us back to the dark side of American political discourse. Only now can we see the direct line between Senator Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. Roy served as Rasputin for both demagogues.

Some New Yorkers forget about their own complicity in Cohn’s sketchy political project. We forget how much a creature of the Bronx and Manhattan’s Park Avenue he was, and how willingly the city’s elite embraced him. They knew the despicable things he had done during McCarthy’s 1953–54 scourge, but they embraced him anyway. In July 1954, after the 27-year-old chief counsel to McCarthy was forced to resign in disgrace, some 2,000 New Yorkers turned up at a dinner at the Astor Hotel near Times Square—sponsored by the Jewish-American Anti-Communist League—and gave Cohn and McCarthy a standing ovation. This was just the beginning of Cohn’s political rehabilitation.

In the early 1950s, he destroyed the lives of thousands of civil servants: He targeted closeted homosexuals and was the boyish prosecutor who gleefully sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. In Washington, he was McCarthy’s attack hound and book burner, known for forcing US Information Service libraries in Europe to purge 30,000 books from their shelves, including titles by Howard Fast and Dashiell Hammett.

Back in New York, Cohn created a career for himself as a ubiquitous, self-promoting hustler, a scheming con man, and a street fighter who somehow always escaped the courts. He could be charming, but he ran what we’d now call a Trumpian “favor bank,” using his photographic memory to keep tabs on who needed what from whom. He was eventually indicted three times for fraud and bribery. (He once brazenly handed an envelope stuffed with cash to a city employee, standing outside the very courtroom in which he was then being tried for said bribery.) And yet, ignoring the evidence stacked against him, New York juries acquitted him in all his trials.

Everyone knew Cohn was a lawyer for the Mafia, representing thugs like Moe Dalitz, Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti. Many knew he was a closeted gay man and a sex addict who paid high sums to teenage boys for sex. And yet as a powerful lawyer, he hypocritically railed against civil rights for the people whom he called “fags.”

Everyone also knew that Cohn was a racist, who routinely used a Yiddish slur to describe Black people. He left a trail........

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