A new biography lays bare the through-line from McCarthy’s witch-hunts to Trump’s war on accountability, and the evidence has been sitting in plain sight for fifty years.
Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark’s American Scoundrel traces Roy Cohn’s “Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump,” and the title undersells it. This isn’t a journey. It’s a relay race, and the baton never dropped.
Cohn graduated Columbia Law at twenty. By twenty-five he was Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, beating Robert F. Kennedy for the job. He ran the hearings. He conducted the interrogations. He was, as Bird puts it, “the ideologue, the svengali, the real brain” behind a witch-hunt that subpoenaed hundreds of people and destroyed careers over suspected communism, suspected homosexuality, suspected disloyalty. He helped press Judge Irving Kaufman to execute Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He intimidated Ethel’s brother into testifying against her. The Rosenbergs’ two children were orphaned so Roy Cohn could prove a point about loyalty.
Then he found Donald Trump.
In 1973, Trump’s family company was facing a federal racial discrimination lawsuit. They had been marking Black applicants’ files with a “C” for “colored” and turning them away. Cohn’s advice: countersue the federal government for $100 million. The countersuit failed. The company settled. But it made headlines, which was the entire point. The lesson Trump took, per the New York Times’s Sam Roberts: never settle, never surrender. Counterattack, counter-sue immediately. No matter how deep the muck, claim victory and never admit defeat.
That is not a legal strategy. It is a blueprint for dismantling accountability, and it is running the country right now.
Bird called Trump four times on his personal number for the book. Trump told stories, rewrote their first meeting to make himself the one who was recognized, and on the final call announced he was too busy: “I’m the president. I have Russia calling. I have China calling.” Then he offered to promote the book. “Anything I promote goes to number one.” A pause. “Of course, it would have to be fair.”
The man who learned everything from Roy Cohn still cannot stop performing the Roy Cohn playbook. Deny, deflect, counterattack, claim victory. The day after the 2016 election, Trump told Roger Stone on the phone: “Wouldn’t Roy love to see this moment? Boy, do we miss him.” In 2017, amid the Russia scandal, he demanded to aides: “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Cohn was disbarred for unethical conduct shortly before he died. Three separate indictments had failed to bring him down. At his disbarment hearing, thirty-six character witnesses showed up. Trump. William F. Buckley Jr. Barbara Walters. The system could not hold one man accountable, and that man went on to teach the next president that the system is there to be gamed.
Cohn died of AIDS in 1986, insisting it was liver cancer even as he received experimental AZT through Washington connections. He was a closeted gay man who persecuted gay federal employees as security risks. The AIDS Memorial Quilt carries three words beside his name: Bully. Coward. Victim.
Bird calls Cohn an “empty vessel” with “no coherent personal philosophy” beyond “shallow mirroring of Ayn Rand’s celebration of unadulterated selfishness.” That emptiness is the point. Cohn was not an ideologue in the sense of believing in something. He was an ideologue of power itself. And that ideology is contagious.
The through-line from McCarthy to Trump is not a coincidence or a curiosity. It is a method. Lie loudly, attack first, never concede, treat the law as a weapon rather than a constraint. It worked for Cohn until it didn’t. It is working for Trump right now.
American Scoundrel is out this week. Read it. Then ask why the institutions that failed to stop Roy Cohn are the same ones we are trusting to stop the man he trained.