Mike Pence said yesterday on Meet the Press that “the president of the United States has every right to criticize the other two branches of government. And we have a long tradition of that in this country.”
Wrong. While other presidents have publicly disagreed with court decisions, none has gone after individual judges with personal invective.
To understand Trump’s strategy, you have to understand his mentor, Roy Cohn, who trained Trump to abuse the legal system, intimidate opponents with personal smears, issue big lies repeatedly to confuse the public, and manipulate the press.
But Cohn was never president of the United States. Now, indirectly, he is.
What do you think?
As old-school as a Brooklyn-Queens real estate developer could be in
post-World War II New York...
NYDAILYNEWS.COM
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The devil in Donald: How the ghost of ‘evil’ Roy Cohn lives on inside Trump
As old-school as a Brooklyn-Queens real estate developer could be in post-World War II New York, family patriarch Fred Trump gave Donald Trump his start in life.
But, as close to a snake in nature and look as a human could be, it was lawyer Roy Marcus Cohn who taught Donald Trump how to live.
More specifically, Roy Cohn mentored Trump to:
- abuse the legal system to routinely cheat people;
- dodge paying taxes through use of — to be polite — inventively aggressive techniques.
- exploit falsehoods and innuendo to achieve his goals.
For three decades, ending with his death in 1986, Cohn was New York and America’s most famous and infamous attorney.
Both a celebrity and an embezzling thief, Cohn served equally as an adviser to the Archdiocese of New York and as a facilitator for Mafia bosses. Cross him and you were dead.
“Roy is evil,” three former business associates — unknown to one another — used those exact three words when refusing to speak with me about Cohn in 1979, six years after the city’s preeminent fixer had become Trump’s mentor.
The two men met by chance in a nightclub at a time when Trump, not yet 30, was breaking from his father’s borough-based empire with hopes of building a kingdom in Manhattan.
Little more than a generation older than Trump, Cohn’s career had already been a wild and villainous ride.
He had served as a federal prosecutor in the atomic bomb espionage trial that sent Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to their deaths.
As chief counsel to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunt for Communists, Cohn had specialized in character assassination by the innuendo and false accusations that came to be known as McCarthyism.
Hauled repeatedly before the bar of justice, Cohn had defeated four indictments on charges of bribery, extortion, blackmail, case fixing and conspiracy to take control of two Illinois banks.
A closeted homosexual, he spouted homophobia that, after his death from AIDS in 1986, helped inspire playwright Tony Kushner to populate his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama, “Angels in America,” with a malevolent Roy Cohn character.
Trump and Cohn crossed paths at a time when Trump needed a lawyer to represent him and his father against federal charges of refusing to rent to blacks in Trump developments in Brooklyn and Queens.
Cohn took the assignment. Despite definitive case histories of discrimination, Cohn fought the federal government to a consent decree without admitting wrongdoing. At that, he took command as Trump’s mentor.
Working out of an E. 68th St. townhouse that was both his residence (the bedroom was filled with frog figurines) and base for his law firm, Cohn wrote the pre-nup that put the screws to Trump’s first wife, Ivana, guided Trump through development deals, and more.
Trump spent nights with Cohn in the decadent madness that was Studio 54 and kept Cohn’s photograph in his desk, ostensibly to intimidate potential litigants with Cohn’s well-earned reputation for trying to destroy opponents by any means necessary.
More than three decades later, while running for President, Trump has described Cohn as merely his lawyer. When asked by the Washington Post whether Cohn had taught him the use of “aggressive tactics and rhetoric,” Trump responded:
“I don’t think I got that from Roy at all. I think I’ve had a natural instinct for that.”
If so, there is still no doubt that Cohn cultivated Trump’s toughest characteristics and served as a role model for how to grab for every advantage, regardless of fairness or of the cost to others.
The parallels in their actions are stunning.
Art of the steal
Trump often tells vendors to go to hell when they submit bills for their goods or services.
After reviewing court cases in 33 jurisdictions, the Wall Street Journal found “a pattern over Mr. Trump’s 40-year career” of refusing to pay up.
“A chandelier shop, a curtain maker, a lawyer and others have said Mr. Trump’s companies agreed to buy goods and services, then reneged when some or all were delivered,” the Journal reported.
Expecting a $34,000 payment, the chandelier seller “accepted reduced payment rather than pay legal bills.”
Owed $100,000 for upright pianos delivered to Trump’s Taj Mahal casino in Atlantic City, J. Michael Diehl accepted $70,000.
“I couldn’t afford to sue the Trump corporation . . . So I took the $70,000,” Diehl wrote in the Washington Post.
Brian Walsh, a former Republican campaign press aide, has tweeted: “True story — my Dad’s company was stiffed by Trump on a six figure telecom job in the 1980’s. Trump told them it would cost more to sue him.”
Compare how Trump has victimized vendors with these findings of a 1979 Daily News investigation of Cohn:
“Over the years, mechanics, travel agencies, stationery suppliers, furniture firms and even temporary employees have gone to court in an effort to collect debts run up by Cohn and his law firm.
“Some got their money. Some got part of it. Some gave up.
“In 1977, five Connecticut merchants filed liens on Cohn’s country retreat. The $5,300 in debts ranged from a $101 oil bill to $1,500 for home repairs. . . .
“Cohn claims he is frequently victimized by tradesmen. But one of Cohn’s creditors contends that he is anything but a sucker.
“‘What he does is very simple. He buys, he doesn’t pay. He makes you go to court and when you get a judgment, he wants to settle for 50 cents on the dollar,’” the creditor said.
He taught Donald everything
(DONOFRIO, CARMINE)
Identical tactics and victimization — the only difference being that, as master of a business empire, Trump exponentially expanded the scale of Cohn’s chiseling.
To hell with taxes
By refusing to release his income tax returns, by declaring that his tax rate is none of anyone’s business, Trump has confirmed for many that they fork over more to the government than the boasting billionaire.
How Trump does it — and how he has long done it — is the more-than-$64 million question.
What’s certain is that he goes above and beyond in striving to slash tax payments. As a result, he is constantly at war with the Internal Revenue Service over whether he has stretched loopholes to the breaking point.
“I think every single year, I’ve had an audit for years,” Trump revealed while campaigning.
At present, Trump says the IRS is auditing his returns for the past three years — and falsely claims that the audit bars him from releasing the documents.
Cohn would have been proud.
From 1958 through 1986, the IRS did not close a single one of his annual audits, because Cohn developed a brazen way of living like a king and paying less in taxes than a pauper — none.
First, he placed all assets under the names of associates. Second, he claimed that he was in the business of simply being Roy Cohn, celebrity person, not Roy Cohn, lawyer. Third, he asserted that the law firm paid him no salary but instead gave him a giant untaxable expense account to carry on with the business of being Roy Cohn, celebrity person.
“All I own are the clothes on my back and some personal possessions. I have no assets. I want no assets, and I need no assets,” Cohn told the News in 1979, when the IRS had placed a $1 million lien to no effect against properties that Cohn claimed belonged to others.
It was not until 1986 that then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani filed suit to force Cohn to pay $2 million in taxes dating to 1959, plus $5 million in interest and penalties.
Four months later, Cohn died. By then he had been disbarred for, among other offenses, stiffing a client out of $100,000 for almost two decades.
Having shared Cohn’s obsession for avoiding taxes, Trump has also shared Cohn’s gleeful pride in paying nothing.
Here’s what Cohn wrote in a 1981 book, “How to Stand Up for Your Rights and Win!”, after explaining his tax schemes and the purchase of a home in Connecticut:
“I got tired of supporting our welfare and food stamp programs” in New York.
Here’s what Trump said after Hillary Clinton pointed out in their debate that a tax return made public in the 1980s showed he had paid zero to the IRS then:
“That makes me smart.”
Plus: “It would be squandered, too, believe me.”
Fear-and-smear
Cohn’s spirit flashes in Trump on the campaign trail.
Notoriously whispering in McCarthy’s ear during Senate hearings, Cohn helped whip up anti-Communist hysteria and cast suspicion on scores of Americans as Communist sympathizers.
Speaking before crowds and obsessively tweeting, Trump has tarred opponents with so much innuendo and so many wild accusations that few eyes blinked when he linked Sen. Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination, saying, “His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being — you know, shot.”
Lobbying against passage of the city’s gay rights law in 1986, Cohn said this in a phone call, according to his friend and biographer Sid Zion:
“You’ve got to get off this fag stuff, it’s very harmful to the city and it’s going to hurt you. These f----ing fags are no good, forget about them.”
Announcing for President, Trump said this of Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bring crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Determined to prevent anyone from blemishing his image, Cohn filed baseless yet costly libel suits, once dragging NBC into court over how he was portrayed in “Tailgunner Joe,” a dramatization of McCarthy’s career.
Across his career, Trump has filed similar suits, in 2006 hitting Timothy O’Brien, author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald,” with a $2 billion action merely for suggesting that Trump might not be a billionaire.
Last year — while he was running for President — Trump’s lawyers threatened the Club for Growth, a respected conservative organization, with a libel suit for running ads that criticized Trump’s campaign positions.
Shameless in the use of money to buy influence, Cohn claimed to have given Nixon $5,000 cash in an envelope.
“I’m hardly one of those Boy Scouts who run around promoting phony ethics laws and rules regarding money and politics,” he wrote.
Trump has donated money to politicians of all stripes, even funnelling $100,000 to the Clinton Foundation.
“When you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do,” he boasts.
No one was closer to Cohn at the end of his life than Peter Fraser, his lover. Fraser also well knew Trump and has, of course, watched Trump campaign. He told the New York Times:
“I hear Roy in the things he says quite clearly. That bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it’s the truth — that’s the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice.”
America is fortunate that Cohn, as influential as he has been in Trump’s life, could never instill urbane polish, invisible wiliness and verbal deftness in the protégé who has risen this close to the White House. He was Michael Corleone. Trump is Luca Brasi.
