Before Trump barged his way into the national consciousness, Roy Cohn was one of the worst villains of any American in our lifetimes— right up there with J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Joseph McCarthy… and on a par with historical miscreants like Jefferson Davis, Andrew Jackson, Nathan Bedford Forrest… A real master of corruption, Cohn built his hideous career by exploiting power, weaponizing fear and perverting the law. From his role as McCarthy's right-hand man during the Red Scare— ruining countless lives through baseless accusations of communism— to his later years as a ruthless Mafia lawyer, Cohn epitomized everything vile about American greed and runaway ambition. With the exception of a small handful of delusional Republicans, his career is universally seen as a showcase of sociopathic disregard for ethics, and he is seen as a man who thrived on manipulation, blackmail… destruction. Most damning of all, Cohn mentored The Donald, passing along his amoral playbook to a demon who went on to wreak even more havoc on the country. So Cohn’s poisonous influence didn’t end with his death; it metastasized into the very heart of modern American politics.
And now there’s a film! Nick Schager’s preview for the Daily Beast noted that it’s the movie Señor T doesn’t want you to see— and for good reason… a damning film about the making of a monster… “a bona fide supervillain origin story.”
As you probably know by now, it’s “an incisive primer on the relationship with Roy Cohn that made the 45th President of the United States who he is today. Which is to say, it lays out the gory details regarding the source of his egomania, greed, ambition, vanity, sociopathy, and heartless rapey-ness, the last of which comes to the fore in a brutal assault of his first wife Ivana.”
We can expect ‘the film to make the MAGA universe explode with rage… The Apprentice is a capitalist riff on Pygmalion by way of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with Cohen the malevolent doctor and Trump his monster, complete (at tale’s end) with a shot of the latter’s head being crudely stapled together in order to erase his growing bald spot.”
When they first met, Cohn recognizes him “as a dreamer determined to do whatever it takes to be Rockefeller-grade rich, as well as something of an empty vessel into which he can pour all his evil. Pour he does, gradually taking Trump under his wing and indoctrinating him in the ways of unabashed cutthroat nastiness. To succeed, Cohn instructs, Trump must follow three surefire rules: attack, attack, attack; deny everything and admit nothing; and never acknowledge defeat and always claim victory. The Apprentice doesn’t make it difficult to see these principles as the foundation of contemporary’s Trump’s ethos, and Cohn proves their effectiveness to his eager and malleable protégé by saving the Trump business’ behind in a court case about discriminatory housing practices. To do this, Cohn uses one of his favorite tactics— blackmail— because, as he counsels Trump in a speech about sports, the key to success is knowing that you have to ‘play the man, not the ball.’ Cohn’s entire playbook is summed up by his pronouncement, ‘None of it matters except winning.’… Self-interested and generous, brazen and cunning, physically slight and intensely intimidating, Strong’s Cohn is a scary creep precisely because he’s not shackled by rules, laws, or morality, and his willingness to stoop to any low to get the job done is epitomized by the fact that, despite being obviously gay, he uses others’ homosexuality as a weapon against them while hiding his own sexual orientation behind closed doors. He’s a demon who wraps his vileness in the American flag and attendant protestations of patriotism, which is, according to him, precisely why he sought the death penalty for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.”
With a helmet of blonde hair and a collection of designer suits, Trump comes across as a vainglorious idiot who discovers that the keys to the kingdom have nothing to do with intelligence, kindness, or generosity; rather, it’s all about talking big, acting bigger, and continually tripling down on those boasts, be it in the courtroom, the boardroom, or in the press (such as when he wages a PR battle against New York’s mayor Ed Koch). By making grand gestures and not taking no for an answer, he woos fashion model Ivana, whose own materialism makes her powerless to resist Trump’s courtship. The Apprentice mocks Trump at regular intervals, such as having him fall down in Aspen after trying to charm Ivana. However, it largely views him not as a buffoon but, instead, as a nascent cretin who just needed the right father figure to mold him into a tyrant.
Stuart Stevens in a top GOP political consultant— or at least he was pre-MAGA. He was Romney’s top strategist in 2012 and earlier worked for fellow Mississippi Republicans Haley Barbour, Roger Wicker and Thad Cochran and for the presidential campaigns of Bob Dole, John McCain and George W. Bush. Other prominent clients included Dick Lugar, Tiom Ridge, Chuck Grassley, Roy Blunt Rob Portman, Larry Hogan and, before she lost her mind, Elise Stefanik. Yesterday, on Twitter, he wrote “The degree of Russian compromise of the Republican party is one of the great stories of American political history. Those of us who worked within the party saw it happen, accompanied by a right-wing media industry that found it profitable to label Russian influence a ‘hoax.’ There's nothing like it in American history.”
Nor was he the only Republican tweeting about Russiagate 2.0 yesterday:
Yeah, it’s Trump Treason again, infecting the whole MAGA-GOP and their media outlets. This week South African fascist Elon Musk persuaded Tucker Carlson— who didn’t need much persuasion— to have notorious Hitler-loving Nazi Darryl Cooper on his already pretty neo-Nazi podcast. That threw even right-wing media into a tizzy— at least the ones trying to pretend to not be anti-Semitic and pawns of Putin— and then out came an indictment of two Russians who were bribing right-wing influencers to push the Putin agenda, especially in regard to Ukraine. The right-wing influencers working fro the Russians included Kremlin-funded Tenet Media’s Tim Pool, Benny Johnson, Liam Donovan, Lauren Chen, David Rubin and Lauren Southern. On Thursday, YouTube took down all the right-wing channels they were using to spread Russian propaganda. Tenet’s home channel alone has over 300,000 subscribers. Chen’s neo-Nazi channel has over half a million subscribers.
The Kremlin was paying them to influence the 2024 elections in Trump’s favor. Although the wing-nuts are all whining how they were “victims,” they were all aware they were being paid by RT to undermine Ukraine and to help get Trump back into the White House. The whole lot of them have been invited to come to Mother Russia for asylum.
On Thursday, Tom Nichols wrote that “Unless you’ve spent time sloshing around in some of the dumber wading pools of the internet, you may not have heard of these people, but they have several million followers among them… [E]ven without this money, some of them were likely to make the same divisive, pro-Russian bilge that they would have made anyway—as long as they could find someone to pay for their microphones and cameras.”
What’s really going on here is that the Russians have identified two major weaknesses in their American adversaries. The first is that a big slice of the American public, especially since the ascent of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, has an almost limitless appetite for stories that jack up their adrenaline: They will embrace wild conspiracies and “news” meant to generate social conflict so long as the stories are exciting, validate their preexisting worldviews, and give them some escape from life’s daily doldrums.
The other is that more than a few Americans have the combination of immense greed and ego-driven grievances that make them easy targets either for recruitment or to be used as clueless dupes. The Russians, along with every other intelligence service in the world, count on finding such people and exploiting their avarice and insecurity. This is not new. (The United States does it too. Money is almost always the easiest inducement to treason.) But the widespread influence of social media has opened a new front in the intelligence battle.
Professional secret agents no longer need to find highly placed Americans who have access to secrets or who might influence policy discussions. Instead of the painstaking work that usually takes months or even years to suborn foreign citizens, the Kremlin can just dragoon a couple of its own people to pose as business sharps with money to burn, spread cash around like manure in a field full of half-wits, and see what blossoms.
…As idiotic as this business was, Americans should not be complacent. Yes, people such as Johnson and Pool are execrable trolls, and yes, Chen has been fired from Blaze Media, a major conservative media outlet. But to the Russians, cooperative foreigners are interchangeable and replaceable. Meanwhile, the Kremlin is playing a very smart game here. For a relative pittance— $10 million is probably the loose change in the bottom drawer of Vladimir Putin’s desk— they gain a potentially huge amount of social discord, which in turn can translate directly into the electoral outcome the Russians so fervently desire: Trump’s return to the Oval Office.
Today, Putin even trolled America by saying— “ironically,” according to the Russian press service TASS— that he would prefer that Kamala Harris win the election. She “laughs so emphatically and infectiously,” he said, that perhaps she wouldn’t impose more sanctions on Russia. That’s a lovely mixture of condescension and sexism, of course. Putin added that Trump had been very hard on Russia and imposed more sanctions than any other president; this is false, but it allowed Putin to affirm an oft-deployed Trump lie.
The Justice Department finally seems to be going on the offense and fighting back against these Russian attacks on America. But this indictment is probably only the tip of the iceberg: Unfortunately, the Russians have scads of money, and plenty of Americans are despicable enough to take their cash.
Spies and traitors don't get firing squads anymore?
The New Republic noted in a letter to subscribers yesterday that when Señor T spoke at the Economic Club of New York, “he implied that he would lift the sanctions on Russia if he is elected to another term. We’re not sure if Trump can even spell quid pro quo, but it sounds like he’ll make it happen if he becomes president again… The $10 million scheme uncovered by the DOJ wasn’t even the only Russian disinformation campaign revealed this week. On Monday, a viral story claiming that Kamala Harris was involved in a hit-and-run accident in 2011 was shown to be the work of a former Florida police officer, John Mark Dougan, who has relocated to Moscow and runs a battalion of A.I.-powered fake news sites. And on Thursday, the U.S. government charged Dimitri Simes, a former adviser to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, for working with a Russian state television network and laundering the proceeds. It is becoming increasingly clear that Vladimir Putin is working hard to tilt the 2024 election in Donald Trump’s favor.”
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