A devil-may-care-as-long-as-it-gets-a-headline attitude was Cohn’s trademark in life. Trump, in our time, has made it his.
His careful manipulation of negative attention is something that Trump noticed immediately when the two met in 1973. Trump and his father had just been sued for allegedly discriminating against black people in Trump’s built-and-managed houses in Brooklyn, and sought out Cohn’s counsel. Among other things, Cohn advised that Trump should “tell them to go to hell”. Cohn was hired, and one of his first acts as Trump’s new lawyer was to file a $100m countersuit that was quickly dismissed by the court. But it made the papers...
“I don’t kid myself about Roy. He was no Boy Scout. He once told me that he’d spent more than two-thirds of his adult life under indictment on one charge or another. That amazed me,” Trump wrote in The Art of the Deal.
The unabashed pursuit of power, quick resort to threats, a love of being in the tabloid spotlight – all of these are things Trump took from his mentor.
In fact, if you’re familiar with Cohn’s history at all, their friendship starts to seem an even greater influence on Trump than any other.
Today, Cohn might be most remembered as a character in a TV series: Al Pacino played him in HBO’s version of Tony Kushner’s Angels In America. In Kushner’s vision we meet Cohn only when he is old and ailing, lying about being gay and having Aids. (Despite being known to have many gay lovers, and his diagnosis of Aids being an open secret in the months before his death, Cohn denied it to all but his closest intimates.) As played by Pacino, his bombast is already pathetic, self-deluding. “You want to be nice or you want to be effective?!”
he shouts at an idealistic acolyte. “You want to make the law, or be subject to it? Choose!”
...As Senator Joseph McCarthy’s chief counsel, [Cohn] was a kind of stage director of the major events of the red scare: the trial of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and the McCarthy hearings. Another man would have let himself be an invisible functionary in those proceedings, but not Cohn.
He made himself visible. He wanted to be front and center, even when the press turned on McCarthy’s tirade. He befriended gossip columnists and used the tabloids. Shamelessness was, in fact, Cohn’s defining trait. And it was a shamelessness that Trump picked up and ran with...
After such a slew of negative attention, most men would have recoiled in shame, gone into hiding, spent less time trying to chat up tabloid columnists and getting themselves further into the spotlight. This was not Roy Cohn’s way. He and Schine continued to appear at the McCarthy hearings, including the disastrous episode where McCarthy decided to investigate the US army and the press finally turned on him.
Cohn ...resigned, but always defended the hearings, once writing an article for Esquire titled, “Believe Me, This Is the Truth About the Army-McCarthy Hearings, Honest”. This piece was widely acknowledged to stretch the truth; letters of complaint poured in. One called the piece “a disgrace; it certainly does little honor for Esquire to publish it”. But for Cohn, the article achieved its purpose: to keep arguing that he had behaved mostly honorably, as a man under siege.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/apr/20/roy-cohn-donald-trump-joseph-mccarthy-rosenberg-trial
Break everything -- the presidency, courts, women, media -- because all bad publicity is still publicity.
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