Monday, September 9, 2019

Roy Cohn & Donald Trump: The Master & the New Master via Maureen Dowd & Matt Tyrnauer, Documentary Filmmaker

Read at least this much & you get the gist of the article:
'“Roy Cohn did the impossible,” Mr. Tyrnauer said. “He created a president from beyond the grave. I don’t think there’s any disputing that. The basic lessons that Trump learned from Cohn were: Never apologize. If someone hits you, hit them back a thousand times harder. Any publicity is good publicity. And find an ‘other.’”
He said that the origin of Mr. Cohn’s career in the 1950s was dooming the Rosenbergs to the electric chair, Jews as Bolsheviks and fifth columnists, and going after gay people in the State Department. [SNG note: Cohn was Jewish & gay.]
“With Trump, the other is Mexicans, Latinos, Muslims, I mean, fill in the blank,” he said. “The lesson of this from history is: Pick your other. That’s what a demagogue does. Trump’s kind of an empty vessel. I think he’s eerily similar to Joe McCarthy in that way. I think it basically comes down to something Ken Auletta said in the film: What a demagogue does is throw out an untruth or a lie and then stands back and watches as that fills the void.”
. . . .
Flamboyant and ruthless met flamboyant and ruthless when Mr. Cohn collided with a young builder named Donald Trump at Le Club sometime in the ’70s.'

NYTIMES.COM
A Vanity Fair correspondent turned documentarian with a fascination for figures of the late 20th century.