The Devilish Legacy of Roy Cohn

 https://www.thefp.com/p/roy-cohn-trump-james-kirchick-american-scoundrel

The infamous lawyer and fixer for mobsters, Joe McCarthy, and a young Donald Trump heralded a new kind of American politics.

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” President Donald Trump demanded in March 2017, barely two months into his first administration. Trump was just given the unwelcome news that his attorney general had recused himself from the Justice Department investigation into his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia, and he needed someone to rescue him.

The plaintive cry—later adopted by director Matt Tyrnauer as the title for his revelatory 2019 documentary about Cohn—spoke to the singular importance that the late lawyer and political fixer held in Trump’s life. Like many powerful men of dubious morality, Trump had relied on Cohn to extricate him from messes of his own making. During his heyday as a real-estate tycoon, Trump kept a framed photograph of Cohn in his office; during contentious meetings, he would point to it and ask—not so much as a question but as a threat—“Would you rather deal with him?”