WASHINGTON POST
POLITICO
Joe McCarthy’s notorious chief counsel during his Senate investigations into communism was a key early mentor to Trump. The red-baiter visibly shaped the real estate mogul’s worldview and belligerent public persona, Michael Kruse explained in an excellent piece for Politico Magazineearlier this month.
- “By the 1970s, when Trump was looking to establish his reputation in Manhattan, the elder Cohn had long before remade himself as the ultimate New York power lawyer, whose clientele included politicians, financiers and mob bosses. Cohn engineered the combative response to the Department of Justice’s suit alleging racial discrimination at the Trumps’ many rental properties in Brooklyn and Queens. He brokered the gargantuan tax abatements and the mob-tied concrete work that made the Grand Hyatt hotel and Trump Tower projects. He wrote the cold-hearted prenuptial agreement before the first of his three marriages … To all of these deals, Cohn brought his political connections, his public posturing and a simple credo: Always attack, never apologize.”
- BUT when Trump found out in the mid-1980s that his friend and associate had AIDS, he shifted legal business away from him and pushed him out of his inner-circle. “Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn reportedly said. “Donald found out about it and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Bell, Cohn’s secretary, told Kruse. “It was like night and day.”