Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, and the Pitfalls of Inflexibility

From the moment in 1973 when Roy Cohn was retained to defend the Trump family in a suit brought by the Department of Justice alleging racist rental practices at the thousands of shabby apartments they owned, a young Donald Trump was smitten.  Here was a man who had attained everything Trump wished to acquire—power, wealth, and the obsession to win at any cost, even if, perhaps especially if, laws were broken or innocent people destroyed.  Cohn reveled in being loathed because it meant he had succeeded in inducing terror in his enemies, a category that took in virtually every other human being on earth.

Cohn didn’t pay his bills or his taxes, survived multiple criminal indictments for everything from stock-swindling to obstructing justice to perjury to bribery to extortion, publicly proclaiming each time that he was the victim of a vendetta.  He sneered at rules and boasted that he had succeeded in making his own.  He was acknowledged as being one of the most feared and despised people in the nation and likely had as much power in New York City as the mayor, all of which he took great satisfaction in ramming down society’s throat.  No one refused his phone calls and he got the best table at every restaurant, including liberal bastions like Elaine’s.

Donald Trump found all that irresistible and adopted Cohn as a mentor, almost a second father.  (With a biological father like Fred Trump, the choice becomes more explicable.)

Cohn’s sexual exploits appealed to young Donald as well, although their tastes appear to have been different.  Cohn, who denied his homosexuality until the day he died of AIDS, used to loll about on his designated couch in Studio 54, dressed in leather pants and surrounded by flamboyantly gay young men, propositioning any other young man who struck his fancy and then, if successful, retiring to a private room, which the owners had thoughtfully provided for him.  He could not have been more open about it yet not one of the dozens of media people who were regulars thought to breathe a word of it.  On another occasion, after a failed tryst, Cohn’s conquest skulked out of his townhouse in the East 60s in the middle of the night and spray painted “Roy Sucks,” up and down the street.  By 7am, a full crew from the Sanitation Department was there, feverishly cleaning it up. 

By the 1980s, however, Cohn began to wear thin on too many people in power and he began to lose influence.  Threats he once sneered at, such as from the IRS, were becoming more real.  People who knew him—he didn’t really have friends—advised him to moderate his behavior but Cohn knew only one way.  With every setback, he doubled down on his rhetoric, expecting to intimidate adversaries who no longer feared him.  Unwilling to adapt to an altered landscape, he lost nearly everything, including his license to practice law in New York.

In February 1986, not yet sixty years old, Roy Cohn died, alone and unmourned.

In the end, it was Cohn’s refusal to recognize that a change in the political environment demanded a change in tactics, his unwillingness to even consider such a thing, that was his downfall.

And here, four decades later, is Cohn acolyte Donald Trump adopting the same posture. Like Cohn, he brags about the lack of need to alter his behavior.  Obviously upset by reports that he had mellowed after a bullet missed his head by inches, he responded that he was left more, not less, vicious by the failed assassination.  He chose as a running mate a man he had been cautioned against by multiple supporters but ignored their advice. He has renewed his sexist vitriol even though women will surely determine whether he wins or loses the election.

Whether Trump’s inflexibility, like Cohn’s, will be the catalyst of his destruction is as yet unclear, but in being blind to the need to devise strategy to meet circumstance, Trump, again like Cohn, has put his faith in another force, which has so far been more than kind to him.

Luck.

Up until now, save that he gives evidence of spending every day bitter, angry, and miserable, Donald Trump might be considered one of the luckiest people on Earth.  The second son of a rich slumlord and real estate profiteer who was in turn the son of a German expatriate draft dodger who made a good deal of money running a string of whorehouses, Trump was given the current equivalent of nearly a billion dollars to follow in the family’s less than pristine footsteps.  Although he did indeed amass something of a fortune, so many of his ventures were ill-considered and atrociously run that he would have attained even greater wealth simply by investing his inheritance in government bonds.

Despite predictions that his quest for elective office would end in catastrophe—he himself initially referred to his candidacy as an infomercial—he had the immense good fortune in 2016 to run against Hillary Clinton, now widely acknowledged to have been an extremely poor candidate, someone who came across as an arrogant elitist, totally lacking the preternatural political instincts of her husband.  (Let us not blame James Comey, slimy though he may have been.  It should never have been close enough for his pronouncement to make a difference.)

Luck seemed to have abandoned him in 2020, but again Cohn-like, he came back even stronger.  Fortune once more seemed on his side when President Biden appeared almost catatonic during a crucial debate and a close election promised to end in a rout.

Now, however, Biden is out and Kamala Harris is in.  Almost every analyst has remarked on Trump’s seeming lack of preparedness for the switch, although it was hardly a total surprise.  But why should he have been prepared?  Like Cohn, Trump sees outside forces as making no difference.  He has become convinced of his own infallibility. 

A clever political analyst once said, “Never confuse good luck with good planning.” 

Roy Cohn refused to heed the warning and paid dearly for it. 

We will all find out if it is now Donald Trump’s turn.