Trump’s Mobbed Up, McCarthyite Mentor Roy Cohn

The Daily Beast ^ | July 23, 2015 | Olivia Nuzzi, former Anthony Weiner Intern

[2ndDivisionVet]

Donald Trump’s brash and bullying style was learned at the heel of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most infamous lawyers.

They met at Le Club, a private disco on the Upper East Side frequented by Jackie Kennedy, Al Pacino, and Diana Ross, according to Trump: The Saga of America’s Most Powerful Real Estate Baron. Donald Trump, the young developer, quickly amassing a fortune in New York real estate and Roy Cohn, America’s most loathed yet socially successful defense attorney who had vaulted to infamy in the 1950s while serving as legal counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy.

The friendship they forged would provide the foundation for Trump's eventual presidential campaign. And in hindsight, it serves as a tool for understanding Donald Trump the Candidate, whose bumper sticker-averse declarations—undocumented Mexican immigrants are “criminals” and “rapists”; Sen. John McCain is “not a war hero”—have both led him to the top of the Republican primary polls and mistakenly convinced many that he is a puzzle unworthy of solving. It may appear that way, but Trump isn’t just spouting off insults like a malfunctioning sprinkler system–he’s mimicking what he learned some 40 years ago.

A longtime friend of Trump’s who was introduced to the candidate by Cohn told me it’s a shame that Cohn’s not alive to see the chaos his protégé has wrought....

[Fightin Whitey]

I'd way more likely take advice from Karl

than from Frank.

Rather eat dinner with him too.

[otness_e]

Actually, are we even sure Roy Cohn was LGBT? Yes, he did die from AIDS, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he was gay. For all we know, he may have contracted it by a botched blood transfusion, like that science fiction writer around the time the HIV/AIDS epidemic was occurring (either Heinlein or Asimov).