When I saw the NY Times title Sunday, Inside The Gangster Image Of Donald Trump, I thought Jennifer Medina might have a new way of looking at Trump’s wanna be life of a Mafia don and his lessons in criminality from mobster attorney Roy Cohn. More of this kind of stuff…
Roy Cohn, the Mafia lawyer, was more than just the consigliere in Trump’s story. He was Donald’s mentor, his godfather. If Trump received an education beyond his two years at Fordham and as a transfer student at Wharton (‘I’m a smart person. I went to the Wharton School of Finance’), it was from his guide through the circles of the Inferno, who conducted masterclasses in malice. Trump was an apt pupil in aggression. ‘I don’t think I got that from Roy at all,’ Trump told the Washington Post. ‘I think I’ve had a natural instinct for that.’ He didn’t really need an education in heartlessness, but he learned the finer points from Cohn. Offering his highest praise, Trump called him ‘a total genius… he brutalised for you.’
Like Trump, Roy Cohn was the pampered son of a politically connected New York family. His father, Albert Cohn, was a major player in the Bronx Democratic Party, an assistant district attorney who was appointed to the division of the New York Supreme Court presiding over the Bronx. Roy Cohn was a child prodigy; he graduated from Columbia Law School at the age of twenty, and was appointed as an assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York. He promoted himself in his early cases by giving false leaks to the New York World Telegram. He was put in charge of prosecuting communist agents, staging several prominent show trials, including one of 11 Communist Party officials for subversion. In 1951, he took effective control of the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were accused of stealing atomic secrets. He pulled strings to appoint both chief prosecutor and judge, then urged the judge to impose the death penalty, though the evidence against Ethel Rosenberg was flimsy. Cohn’s tour de force brought him to the attention of Senator Joseph McCarthy, who hired him as chief counsel in his Red-hunting investigations. After the Red Scare came the Lavender Scare, when Cohn launched a campaign against homosexuals in government jobs, though he was a closeted homosexual himself.
Cohn opened a law office in New York, taking on such clients as the Mafia kingpins Tony Salerno, Paul Castellano, John Gotti and Carmine ‘The Cigar’ Galante, underboss of the Bonanno crime family-- as well as the Catholic Archdiocese of New York and the New York Yankees. He was the city’s supreme fixer. The menacing milieu around him was portrayed in the 1957 noir movie Sweet Smell of Success, about an influential and vicious New York tabloid newspaper columnist called J.J. Hunsecker, modelled on the latter-day Walter Winchell, who operates from a booth at the 21 Club, where he dines with movers and shakers. Hunsecker rules the town, making and wrecking reputations through smears and fear. When he uses a PR agent to destroy his sister’s jazz musician boyfriend, who denounced him for his ‘phony patriotism’, the plot turns nasty.
Donald Trump met Roy Cohn at Le Club, a private New York disco, in 1973, when Trump was 27 and had a serious problem. The Justice Department was suing him and his father for racial discrimination in their building at 100 Central Park South. ‘My view is tell them to go to hell,’ Cohn advised, ‘and fight the thing in court.’ From that moment, Cohn and Trump were inseparable. Cohn recalled that Trump would phone him more than a dozen times a day. With Cohn as their attorney the Trumps filed a countersuit against the federal government for using ‘Gestapo-like tactics’. Their suit was instantly dismissed and two years later the Trumps settled after being forced to sign a decree forbidding them from engaging in discriminatory practices.
Roger Stone, a longtime Cohn protégé who began his political career as a dirty trickster and ‘ratfucker’ for Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972, explained the relationship. ‘First of all,’ he told an interviewer, ‘Roy would literally call up and dictate pieces for Page Six [of the New York Post] because Rupert [Murdoch] was a client and because Roy always had good material. So Roy understood the tabloids. Donald, I think, learned the tabloid media, and the media cycle, from Roy.’ Cohn was the sorcerer and Trump the apprentice. ‘Roy was a mentor in terms of the fast track,’ Stone said. ‘I mean, Donald was from Queens, Manhattan’s the fast track. I think, to a certain extent, Donald learned how the world worked from Roy, who was not only a brilliant lawyer, but a brilliant strategist who understood the political system and how to play it like a violin.’ For Trump, Cohn served ‘like a cultural guide to Manhattan’, Stone told the Washington Post. ‘Roy was more than his personal lawyer.’
Cohn took him to the 21 Club, where they held court in Cohn’s reserved red leather booth. He took him to his townhouse on 68th Street, where he lived and conducted his law business, and which was filled with a running crew of attractive young gay men, models, cigar-chomping politicians, gangsters and journalist hangers-on. ‘Roy lived in a matrix of crime and unethical conduct,’ according to his biographer Nicholas von Hoffman. He ‘derived a significant part of his income from illegal or unethical schemes and conspiracies, the most blatant of which was not paying income tax’.
…Cohn greased the skids with favours. ‘I got to know everybody,’ Trump said. Cohn arranged for the Mob to construct Trump’s towers and provide protection against labour trouble. ‘You know how many lawyers in New York represent organised-crime figures? Does that mean we’re not supposed to use them?’ Trump asked. Cohn threatened to sue anyone in Trump’s way to secure leases on properties and city tax abatements. He wrote the prenuptial agreement stipulating that Trump’s first wife, Ivana, would return all gifts in the event of a divorce, and coerced her to sign; Cohn had suggested an associate to serve as her lawyer. (‘I would never buy Ivana any decent jewels or pictures. Why give her negotiable assets?’ Trump told his friends, according to Vanity Fair.) And Cohn finagled a federal judgeship for Trump’s sister, Maryanne Trump Barry. When anyone resisted Trump’s demands, he waved Cohn’s picture in their face. ‘Would you rather deal with him?’ he would say.
The State of New York disbarred Cohn in 1986 for unethical and unprofessional behaviour described in the judgment as ‘particularly reprehensible’. A month later, he died of Aids, an illness he tried to conceal (he told Trump he had cancer). He was an outrageous racist and self-loathing Jew, freely spewing epithets about ‘niggers’ and ‘kikes’. He was also a self-hating homosexual, who obsessively denounced ‘fags’ and crusaded against gay rights. When he was dying Trump turned away from him, shifting his business to other lawyers. ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this to me,’ Cohn said. ‘Donald pisses ice water.’ Cohn called Trump to ask him to find a room in one of his hotels for Cohn’s former lover and assistant, near death himself from Aids. Trump got him a ‘tacky’ room and sent Cohn the bills. Cohn refused to pay. Trump’s underlings called to evict the dying man. The only surprising part of the story is Cohn’s shock.
But, no, it was another less exciting— but maybe more relevant story like this one— how the Trump campaign uses rap to appeal to young, lo-info minority voters and how Trump-style is appealing to the rap community. Monday, for example, Amber Rose, an OnlyFans model, influencer, author of How to Be a Bad Bitch and former girlfriend to rappers, spoke at the GOP convention. She told the overwhelmingly white audience that “she once believed ‘left-wing propaganda that Donald Trump was a racist.’ But now, she said, she had ‘put the red hat on, too… These are my people,’ she said. ‘This is where I belong.’”
Medina wrote that “Trump and his allies have steadily adopted street slang, music and style, selling $400 golden sneakers, blasting hip-hop at rallies, inviting conservative artists to Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club and residence in Palm Beach, Fla., and even welcoming rappers accused of murder onstage at a rally. He has played up a macho invincibility and swagger in his messaging, railing against his felony convictions and casting himself as an outlaw. After Trump was booked at an Atlanta jail last year, his campaign spokesman posted a video of the former president’s motorcade on Twitter, with the message: ‘gang gang bitches.’ Surviving the assassination attempt this month has fueled the effort. In the hours after Trump was shot in the ear at a rally, the rapper 50 Cent posted an image of his Get Rich or Die Tryin’ album cover with Trump’s head superimposed on his body… It all taps into a well of distrust— of both the justice system and the Democratic establishment— shared by many young men of color. And there are signs, in polling and public endorsements from figures like Rose, that it is having an impact.”
Bakari Kitwana, who has chronicled hip-hop and politics for decades, called the Trump campaign’s efforts an “insidious play on racial stereotypes.”
“It severely underestimates the Black community, but it also shows that neither Democrats nor Republicans have appealed to the hip-hop community in a serious way,” he said. “Instead, they want to get people up there with him and get the people who are their fans, but it’s not any kind of substantive conversation.”
Yet Trump is seeking to exploit a real political shift. Polling suggests that Black voters and Latino voters are supporting his campaign at levels once considered out of reach for Republicans. Young Latino and Black men are some of those most unhappy with President Biden’s candidacy, a factor for many Democrats pushing to get him out of the race.
Trump has remained broadly unpopular with Black voters, and much of the new support is coming from people who are not paying close attention to politics. But even micro-movements in his direction can have an impact in a close race. The Trump campaign believes its outreach to influencers and celebrities is more effective than traditional door knocking. “This is a totally different election and a different campaign,” said Danielle Alvarez, a spokeswoman for the campaign.
Few political observers believe that TikTok videos from rappers are directly driving Trump’s apparent bump among Black and Latino voters. But they do think the endorsements matter: Supporting Trump is becoming “normalized and acceptable” in communities where it was once taboo, said Kevin Powell, a civil rights activist and hip-hop historian.
That is, in part, a result of the lack of enthusiasm for Biden compared with four years ago, he said.
“In 2024, there is no mass movement happening like there was in 2020,” he said.
Trump’s stock has risen most in the corners that have long celebrated outlaws— artists who rap about criminal exploits and celebrate people who survive and thrive outside a legal system that is often hostile to young Black and Latino people. Talking about voting for a former president recently convicted of 34 felonies— and rejecting a Democratic president— has become one more way to give the system the middle finger.
…Democrats say it is all evidence of short-term memory and misplaced anger. Lost from the conversation, they note, is Trump’s record of reinforcing racial stereotypes: He took out an advertisement in 1989 that called for the death penalty after a group of Latino and Black teenagers were accused of raping a jogger in Central Park. The teenagers, known as the Central Park Five, were later wrongly convicted.
…In 2016, when Kanye West made a pilgrimage to Trump Tower after the election, he was viewed as an outlier.
Today, he would be part of a trend. Lil Pump, a rapper from Miami, declared Trump the “greatest president who ever lived” and had the former president’s mug shot tattooed on his thigh.
Snoop Dogg, who in 2020 said he could not “stand to see this punk in office one more year,” has reversed himself.
“I have nothing but love and respect for Donald Trump,” he told the Sunday Times of London this year, adding, “He ain’t done nothing wrong to me. He has done only great things for me.” He praised the former president for pardoning Michael Harris, a founder of Death Row Records who was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder.
Trump’s pardons for Harris and several other hip-hop figures are part of the turnabout. Just days before leaving office in 2021, Trump pardoned Lil Wayne and granted a commutation for Kodak Black, who both faced gun-related convictions.
“Once he started getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money, aw, baby, we love Trump,” Sexyy Red, a popular rapper, said on a conservative podcast last fall. He is bold and funny, she added. “We need people like him.” (She declined to be interviewed for this article, but later said on Twitter that the comment was not an endorsement.)
Trump has relished this new image.
Last month, Sheff G and Sleepy Hallow, whose real names are Michael Williams and Tegan Chambers, came to Trump’s side in the Bronx and called to “make America great again.” Both men are charged in a conspiracy that Brooklyn prosecutors say led to 12 shootings, and Williams also faces two counts of attempted murder. They both pleaded not guilty and are out on bail.
Trump has also encouraged a stable of rappers who write political lyrics, post videos online, travel to his rallies and visit Mar-a-Lago. The group includes Forgiato Blow, whose video aired at the Republican National Convention, and a Miami-based duo known as Trump Latinos. (Sample verse: “Made me relate when they hit you with the RICO / Now the whole ’hood is screaming ‘Free Trumpito.’”)
When the two men attended Trump’s rally in the Bronx, Black and Latino teenage boys huddled around them and posed for pictures, watching them as they appeared to freestyle. One of the duo sported a large MAGA tattoo on his neck, which he flashed frequently. Both men declined to give their real names.
“Trump was a playboy mack daddy, you know, and all that, and guys wanted to be like Trump because he was a millionaire,” said Andres Hernandez, 54, a construction worker from Brooklyn who attended the rally and sounded like a lot of Trump supporters— drawn to Trump’s cultivated image of the rich entrepreneur.
Former President Barack Obama sounded alarms that Trump’s appeal could catch on in communities where Democrats have dominated. There is an allure of “wealth, power, frankly, greed,” Obama said in 2020, after Trump made gains with both Black and Latino voters in that election.
“If there are some in the hip-hop community who are constantly rapping about bling and depicting women in a certain way, and then they hear Donald Trump basically delivering the same version of it, they might say, ‘Yeah, that guy, that’s what I want. That’s what I want to be.’”
and he never went to prison for anything. so whose fault is that?