The Roy Cohn School of Politics and Diplomacy
By Missang Oyongha
The ultimate tribute to Donald Trump’s cold-bloodedness was paid to him by his tutor in the dark arts of malice, brinkmanship and demagoguery, Roy Cohn. “Donald pisses ice water,” the AIDS-stricken sorcerer Cohn is reported to have remarked upon discovering that his former apprentice and legal client had abandoned him to his fate, or at least to the mercy of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.
Cohn had been chief counsel to that other pre-Trumpian witchfinder and demagogue, Senator Joseph McCarthy, hounding alleged communists and purging suspected homosexuals from the federal bureaucracy. When the McCarthy frenzy ended in 1954, with many lives, careers and reputations baselessly ruined, Cohn suffered no serious consequences beyond Senate censure and a certain notoriety; and parlayed his perverse cachet into friendships with J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and the Reagans.
The gamut of his influence is revealed in stark relief when we learn that he was the figurative bedfellow of New York’s leading mafia bosses as well as legal counsel to the Catholic Archdiocese of New York. During Trump’s formative years as a New York landlord, speculator and social climber, fellow Bronx native Roy Marcus Cohn was his tour guide into the moral no-man’s-land where everything is permissible and any residues of scruple are unseemly; where name-calling and smears are the preferred modes of engagement; where everything can be contested, even the objective reality of inauguration crowds or Barack Obama’s birthplace.
The Cohn imprint on Trump is all but genetic. With performative hypocrisy, Cohn denied that he was gay; when he contracted AIDS in the 1980s he lied that he was suffering from liver cancer; and he sought to deny or defer age and mortality with a series of facial surgeries. Towards the end, thirteen years of presumed friendship seemed to count for nothing with Trump, the man with no fixed loyalties, and Cohn, already a physical ruin, felt reduced to a biographical asterisk. Ultimately, Trump made up for his brief frostiness by inviting the wilting Cohn to his newly-bought estate, Mar-a-Lago. When, in the annus horribilis of 1986, Cohn lost both his law licence and his life in swift sequence, there were those who saw the long, icy hand of poetic justice.
In 2016, thirty years after Cohn’s death, his erstwhile protégé was elected president of the United States, and because conditioned reflexes die hard found himself nostalgically asking “Where is my Roy Cohn?” when Attorney General Jeff Sessions decided to act out of principle and recuse himself from the Russia investigation.
Narratives about the cultivation by nefarious foreign powers of covert and sometimes unwitting individuals have been a trope of American popular culture at least since the McCarthy era. The 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate offered cinemagoers the spectacle of a US soldier brainwashed into becoming an assassin by Sino-Russian conspirators. The story was modified radically in the 2004 version of the film; as well as with Philip Roth’s compelling counterfactual novel, The Plot Against America, which imagines an America in which Nazi sympathiser and folk hero Charles Lindbergh defeats Franklin Roosevelt in the 1933 election and orchestrates an anti-Semitic relocation program called Just Folks.
The theme of the insidious agent was of course stoked with outlandish fervour by the birther and Islamist fabrications against Barack Obama, championed by Trump in his pre-presidential iteration. In 2019, Cohn’s cousin David Marcus wrote a candid Politico article in which he made plain that his relative ‘desecrated Congress, the courts and other American institutions.’ After a lifetime of hubris, Cohn was ultimately disbarred by the New York Appellate Court for ‘dishonesty, fraud, deceit, and misrepresentation.’
Marcus was also certain that Cohn would have balked at Trump’s suspicious subservience to the ex-KGB officer Vladimir Putin. In a perverse fashion, Cohn’s absurdist theatricals during the Army-McCarthy hearings and during the “Lavender Scare,’ and the lack of remorse or consequence had pointed his protégé towards the art of the outrageous.
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Is it not also a matter of record that Trump himself has equally desecrated Congress, the courts and no less an American institution than the presidency itself? Contrary to the evidence of history, Trump has blamed Ukraine for starting the Russian invasion in 2022; he has smeared its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, as a dictator; and has asked, like a hyper-ambitious New York extortionist, for $500 billion worth of Ukrainian natural resources in recompense for military assistance. History sometimes repeats itself as farce, because it was an earlier act of blackmail against Zelensky that led to Trump’s impeachment in 2019. Trump’s curious deference to Putin might have rankled Cohn, but the meister would have nodded in approval at the strong arm tactics of his protégé.
Half a century before Trump began his crusade against DEI, the Justice Department charged him and his father with violating the Fair Housing Act by denying ‘colored’ applicants tenancy in their Brooklyn and Queens apartments; in effect maintaining an undiverse and non-inclusive whites-only policy. It was Cohn, at that fateful first meeting with Donald at Le Club, who urged the Trumps to file a countersuit charging the Justice Department with ‘defamation,’ and asking for $100 million. The Cohn suit did not seek to argue the Trump’s innocence; instead it sought to tie the Justice Department up in a case that would be adjudicated for two years, and ended in a settlement by the Trumps. Their original rental policy was however unchanging, and they were unchastened by the legal contretemps.
The Cohn who blurred the boundaries between the personal and the professional by running his law firm from his multi-storey New York townhouse must surely have been an inspiration to the Trump who spirited classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, and offered the metaphysical defence that he had declassified the documents merely by thinking of doing so. The Cohn who was less interested in preparing for courtroom argument than in suborning the judge beforehand, was a model for the Trump who removed James Comey as FBI Director in 2017 because he would not halt an investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. “I need loyalty,” Trump told James Comey during a private White House dinner, channelling the Cohn whose obsession with the fealty of subordinates led him to impose a ‘loyalty oath’ on Subcommittee staff.
Regardless of the imprimatur of seventy-six million American voters, what are we to make of a president who has repurposed the Guantanamo Bay base as a detention centre for people who have done nothing but arrive in America illegally? What moral authority can we ascribe to a president whose newfound consigliere Elon Musk gave an unequivocal Nazi salute on inauguration day, January 20, and attempted to boost the electoral chances of the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany? We must remember that this is the same president who in August 2017 had no difficulty establishing a moral equivalence between neo-Nazi/white supremacist marchers in Charlotte, North Carolina and the anti-racists who gathered to oppose them, finding ‘very fine people on both sides.’
We remember, of course, the Trump who in 1989 took out racist full-page advertorials in New York’s major dailies asking for the execution of the wholly innocent Central Park Five, and has never apologised for his calumny. In 21st century America a president is promulgating an Orwellian order in which all references to the word ‘climate’ on official websites are forbidden, as if that singular act will alter the reality of global warming, CO2 emissions and climate change. This, after all, is the president who in 2020 suggested, defying common sense and a silent Dr Deborah Birx, that covid-19 could be cured by injecting bleach into the body.
This is a president who, in Stalinist fashion, has referred to former Special Counsel Jack Smith as an ‘enemy of the people,’ solely for performing his lawful duty to investigate a suspected crime. When two planes crashed at Washington’s Ronald Reagan airport in January, Trump recklessly and callously rushed to lay the blame for the disaster on DEI hires and the Democrats, well before any investigation had even begun, and in defiance of all logic. The crass political point he hoped to make was more important to the president than the truth, as ever. Denunciations of DEI as the symptom for what is clearly considered the ‘degenerate’ strain in American public life have become ritual for Trump and the MAGA crowd. Trump has taken over the Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts, and it is my full expectation that Americans will soon be treated to an operatic performance of dog whistles in a major key. If satire died when Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, then surely irony was buried when Trump was reelected to the presidency?
The neoconservatives William Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote, in 2000, a prescient essay in which they lamented America’s ‘steady moral and strategic disarmament.’ The Kristol-Kagan paper, while in the main an overt argument for regime change in Iraq and elsewhere, also included a warning about the possible resurgence of an imperialist Russia and the impossibility of rational dialogue with rogue regimes like those in Baghdad, Belgrade and Pyongyang. Twenty-five years after that essay was published, the US is witnessing a moral and strategic abdication unlike any within living memory, perpetrated by no less than its very commander-in-chief.
Not only has Donald Trump discarded such instruments of American soft power as USAID, he has calmly advocated the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza, speaking from what was once the virtue-signalling pulpit of the Oval Office. We are witnessing the emergence, the resurgence actually, of a Trump Doctrine of honour among tyrants and woe to all cherished notions of punctilio. Russia, in fulfilment of the Kristol-Kagan prophecy, launched an unprovoked invasion of Ukraine which has now entered its third year.
In a 1995 analysis of the post-World War 2 ‘unconditional surrender’ imposed on Germany and Japan by the victorious Allies, the sainted George Kennan addressed the mistaken assumption ‘that it is both desirable and possible to exclude an entire population from participation in the designing of its own future.’ One wonders what Kennan would have made of an American president being accommodating to the point of supine towards a Russian president. An American president who convenes in Riyadh a latter-day Yalta to design the future of Ukraine with the Russian aggressors and excludes not only the Ukrainians but the Europeans. An American president whose briefing memos seem to have been prepared by the Kremlin. An American president who seems prepared to turn his back on the NATO alliance that has largely held since 1949.
Kennan wrote in 1995 that the Europeans needed to establish a security organisation of which the US would not be a member. He was writing a mere six years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR, when it was thought inconceivable that Russia would ever again pose a geopolitical or ideological threat to the triumph of liberal democracy. Equally absent in 1995 was any prospect of transnational terrorism of the sort inaugurated with the al-Qaeda bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. In light of the Trump Doctrine, foreign policy realism in Europe will now consist of a distrust of the US.
American presidents have often veered between high-minded, if questionable, defences of their nation’s ‘vital interests’ and what has been regarded as a craven abdication of moral responsibility. For this reason very few pages in the annals of US foreign policy are free from blood stains either directly or vicariously inflicted. Witness, for instance, the counter-intuitive aftermath of the first Gulf War, when President Bush senior led the Kurds and Shiites to believe that the US would intervene militarily to depose Saddam Hussein. When the Kurdish uprisings began, Hussein’s forces crushed them ruthlessly, while the Americans, suffering a sudden failure of will, looked away. President Bush junior’s 2003 invasion of Iraq was widely seen as a filial attempt to revisit the earlier failure, although it too was a strategic error of incalculable proportions, embarked on under false pretexts.
President Clinton, in another episode, was driven to intervene in Kosovo in 1999 precisely because the US was seen to have failed to prevent the Rwandan genocide of 1994. These were all multilateral operations, conducted in concert with NATO allies and a motley ‘coalition of the willing,’ with the US, perforce, as cutting edge. No American president has acted with more palpable bad faith towards presumed allies than Donald Trump, even allowing for the fact that he came to office with zero foreign policy expertise or bona fides.
During a seminar after he delivered the Theodore White lecture at Harvard in 2003, Lyndon Johnson’s legendary biographer Robert Caro referred to LBJ’s reputed insistence on receiving only one-page briefing memos. Caro surmised that there was a certain rejection of nuance and detail inherent in expecting complicated matters of politics or foreign policy to be adequately addressed in one page. At that same Harvard seminar, NPR’s Daniel Schorr considered the idea that LBJ (for all his Machiavellian political gifts) was not adept at foreign policy, was too intellectually incurious to acquire the facts by reading scholarly literature, and was thus vulnerable to the schemes and simplicities of those who were ostensibly better-versed.
The Vietnam debacle, Caro and Schorr implied, stemmed from this presidential blindness to the history of South Asia, and a blinkered focus on theories about the ‘domino effect.’ And so when Trump announced in an executive order that he was placing sanctions on South Africa for its treatment of white farmers, he seemed to be advertising not only his own ignorance of the true situation, but the propaganda of advisers and lobbyists who have his ear. Or perhaps, in the style inherited from Cohn, and as we have seen with Ukraine, with Russian election collusion, with the Justice Department suit of 1973, with the Obama birther hoax, and with the January 20 insurrection, Trump knew the truth but chose to surround it with a bodyguard of falsehoods.
- Missang Oyongha was on the staff of the Presidential Advisory Committee on National Dialogue, and currently serves as the Editor of MMG.
