Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark have written a book Trumpworld doesn’t want you to read. Published on Tuesday, American Scoundrel is a propulsive, horrifying biography of Roy Cohn, the New York mob lawyer whose extraordinary life charted, as the book’s subtitle has it, a “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump”. He said he looked at the galleys, and he got back to my publicist and said, ‘I’m not interested.’ I’m kind of surprised.
This is a serious biography of the president’s mentor, whom he publicly admires and says he still misses.” From the mid-70s to the mid-80s, Cohn guided Trump through the cutthroat world of New York real estate. Everything brutal about Trump, in business and politics, he probably learned from Cohn. How to profit from ties to organized crime?
How to stay a step ahead of the law? How to remorselessly lie and never admit wrong or defeat? Small wonder that in 2017, amid scandal over links to Russia that aides couldn’t master, Trump memorably demanded: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Trump does know about American Scoundrel, because Bird called him four times on his personal number.
I asked, ‘Well, how did you first meet Roy Cohn?’ And I was expecting what he had said before in The Art of the Deal and in interviews, and instead he flipped the story all the way upside down. Instead of him going up to the older man, recognizing the powerful lawyer sitting at a nearby table at Le Club in Manhattan [in 1973], he said, ‘Oh, Roy Cohn recognized me. I was making a name for myself as a young developer in Manhattan.’” Another lesson from Cohn: tell the story however the hell you want.
Describing his final Trump call, Bird said: “It’s so weird. You cold-call him, and he picks up. This time, instead of politely listening to my questions, he says, ‘Oh, I can’t do this.
I don’t have time for this. You shouldn’t be using this number. I have China calling.’ And I say, ‘OK, I understand, Mr President, but I just have two questions.’ “And I ask, ‘Did you know that Roy Cohn in 1976 voted for Jimmy Carter?’ And he says, ‘Ah, that’s unbelievable.
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