Kai Bird, Author: Roy Cohn, the man who shaped Trump?

0:00This BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. The BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.

1:00The BBC Podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. We need teetling, we need trust. These companies don't really, they don't care what governments do. This is a war. It's the first thing that we want is the word to end. For this episode, I speak to author Kai Bird about Roy Cohn, the lawyer who helped drive McCarthyism and later became a mentor to Donald Trump. Kai argues that understanding Cohn is key to understanding Trump's political playbook.

2:01Cohn rose to prominence in the early 1950s as Senator Joe McCarthy's chief counsel, helping lead the campaign against those said to be communists in the United States system. In the 1970s and 80s, he became Trump's lawyer and mentor, helping shape the young property developers approach to power. Kai describes how Trump began to copy Cohn from the way he spoke to the personalized number plates on his car. He writes that Cohn taught Donald Trump how to respond to criticism by attacking, denying and never apologising. Lessons, he says, provided a blueprint for Trump's future political life. He had no guardrails, he had no rules. He told Donald Trump, you know, when criticized attack, attack, attack, denied, denied, denied, always go on the offensive, never apologise. And the early Trump, when he met Roy Cohn, he began mimicking Roy.

3:05And we read about Donald Trump every day in the newspapers. We hear him talking on the radio and TV. But no one really understands where he came from. And I would argue you can only do so by looking at the life of Roy Cohn. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Kai Bird. Oh, it's absolutely a New York story, you know. Donald Trump is from New York. To understand Donald Trump, you really have to understand Roy Cohn. He's the key to understanding the last 10 years of the Trump era. Donald Trump is Roy Cohn, I would argue. I mean, I suppose what we've got to get to for people who don't live in New York and don't really know it very well, is the bare fist tribalism of this city. Yes, it's got some quaint old ladies. Yes, it's got some fabulous fashionistas.

4:07But it's a place where if I want your job, Kai, I come for it, I go through your front door and I smash you in the face. New Yorkers can be ruthless and driven. And that's particularly true of the young real estate developer who at the age of 27 met Roy Cohn at a New York Private Dinner Club in October of 1973. And they bonded because Roy was someone that Donald Trump knew had already been indicted three times in the 1960s for bribery and fraud. And he'd gotten off in jury trials all three times. So Trump admired this. He wanted a ruthless lawyer, a fearsome lawyer, and that was Roy Cohn, who taught him how to deal with the press, how to deal with the courts, taught him that the rules were for the small man and he could break them.

5:08He broke all the rules. You know, he was under audit for two decades. This sounds very much like our current president. He was the kind of guy who would never pay his bills, his dry cleaning bills, his liquor bills, all over Manhattan. And he got away with it. And in terms of people who get off with things, they're found innocent, aren't they? So let's just talk a bit about how Roy Cohn made his name. Is it correct that he had been involved in the trials of spies? Americans, people accused of spying against America? How do he made his name as a lawyer in some of the biggest cold war cases? Yes, exactly. Now, he graduated from Columbia Law School in the late 40s and at the age of 21, became an assistant prosecutor and a sort of commie hunter. And he was very much associated with the prosecution of the Rosenbergs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were convicted of being atomic spies.

6:13And Roy delighted in sending them to the electric chair. That's where he really made his name. But then from there, he went on to become chief counsel to Senator Joe McCarthy on his infamous subcommittee. And he became an investigator of communists, of gay men who happened to be working for the federal government. And Roy became a book burner. He famously went on a junket to Western Europe, touring US Embassy libraries and frightening librarians into taking books off the shelf and destroying them because they were associated with authors who might have been left-wing at some point in their life. He was notorious. And after he became famous in June, the spring of 1954, April, May, June, July, when for nearly 60 days, he was on national television in what was called the Army McCarthy hearings.

7:24And he was only 27 years old. And so this was a major event, the first political event in modern American history in which everything was televised live. He was the internet, really. He was the internet sensation of his day. And he had what became known as his rules. And of course, there's been a movie made now depicting the relationship between the young Donald Trump and Roy Cohn. What were Roy Cohn's rules? He had no guardrails. He had no rules. He told Donald Trump, you know, when criticized attack, attack, attack, denied, denied, denied, always go on the offensive. Never apologize. And always, you know, go to the gossip columnists. So in his day, there was no internet. But there were gossip columnists. And Roy was their source for all sorts of stories.

8:25He got his name in the newspaper almost twice a week in the New York City press. And Donald Trump, again, admired this. And Trump, you know, in the early Trump, when he met Roy Cohn, he began mimicking Roy. He began mimicking how he talked. He saw that Roy Cohn had vanity plates on his role's Royce. So he asked Roy to arrange for the same vanity plates for Trump. He started talking like Roy, which is sort of the talk of the Mothioso. And, you know, Roy was in fact in the 1970s when he knew Donald Trump. He was also a lawyer to all five mob families in New York City. And so, you know, we Americans, and I'm sure foreigners everywhere are scratching their heads trying to figure out what happened to American the last 10 years.

9:26And we read about Donald Trump every day in the newspapers. We hear him talking, incessantly, on the radio and TV. But no one really understands where he came from. And I would argue you can only do so by looking at the life of Roy Cohn, who was, I would argue, the quintessential American scoundrel. I suppose the question for friends and foes who want to get your great learning on the subject of Donald Trump is when you see this president, do you see Roy Cohn? When you see President Trump deal with Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, and tell him to push off your the worst country to deal with. When you see him flattering King Charles of our country, do you see Roy Cohn? When you see him go and meet Putin in Alaska, do you see Roy Cohn? Well, absolutely. I watch Donald Trump on the news every day. It's really disheartening. And what I see is the language and someone who mimics Roy Cohn every day.

10:34You know, I've had several interviews with Donald Trump about his late mentor. Roy Cohn died of AIDS, a closeted gay man in 1986. But when I talked to Donald Trump about him last year, he spoke of him in glowing, admiring terms. This was a great man, he said. This was, we won a lot of cases together. He admired sort of Roy Cohn's gumption, his willingness to break the rules, the fact that he had no guardrails at all about his personal life. You know, the fact that he could talk about people without any embarrassment. You know, he was openly a racist, he was openly anti-gay, even though he was a closeted gay man himself. And Donald Trump knew this. It's an incredible story and it's a very colorful story. And it tells the story of America in the 20th century and how we got to where we are in the year 2026.

11:47Do we know if Roy Cohn was an American Democrat? You said he had these crimes, these flaws. But did he love the United States of America? Did he love your country with its pitfalls, its brick bats and its bouquets? Oh, Roy absolutely claimed that he loved America. You know, he died in 86 and I visited his mausoleum in Queens, outside just one of the boroughs of New York City. And written on the mausoleum is Roy M. Cohn, lawyer and patriot. And those were the words that he chose to put on his mausoleum. Of course, he was a lawyer who never paid attention to the law. He went around Manhattan telling people, don't talk to me about the law, tell me who the judge is, the implication being that he could get his clients what they wanted by influencing the judges.

12:49And it was true. He practiced his law over the telephone. He tried never to write anything down. And you look at our president today, Donald Trump hates it when people take notes. He never puts during his long career as a real estate developer. He tried to avoid putting down things on paper. Like Roy, he was under audit from the IRS. It's just an extraordinarily dark story. And that's the subtitle of this book, American Scoundrel. Roy Cohn's dark journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump. And there is in fact a direct line between McCarthyism and the Trump era. And it is Roy Cohn. You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service with me, patio Connell.

14:13The future is for you at cmedroop.com forward slash podcast derivatives are not suitable for all investors and involve the risk of losing more than the amount originally deposited and any profit you might have made. This is not a recommendation or offer to buy sell or retain any specific investment or service. Innovation has always kept the world moving forward, but it also comes with risk in a world that is as complex and unpredictable as it is exciting. Access Excel is facing into risk. As a leading global insurer, we constantly push the boundaries to protect your business and power your innovations. Access Excel, facing into risk for a future to be imagined. This advertisement doesn't constitute an offer or solicitation nor a description of any products or services of access Excel. It's interesting for me to hear all presidents discussed by their backstory. It's certainly very common to do so. And Donald Trump wouldn't like what's being said in this book, I don't think. But he would like to talk about swashbuckling New York property deals because that is part of who he is.

15:18And he might very well want to talk about the friends he met on the way up. There is no shame in doing business in the United States. That's one of the big gets about the USA. And doing business is not like a children's primary school. So here's another few presidents who were very much influenced by where they came from. You've got LBJ, the 36th president. It's impossible to think of him as anything other than a southerner he came from Texas. In fact, he said, I guess every person feels a part of the place where he was born. And this is my country, the hill country of Texas. Then obviously coming from somewhere like that is sort of who you are. Jimmy Carter was always farming when he could in Georgia. Bill Clinton, born in Hope, Arkansas. And when nominated, I was there at Madison Square Garden when he was nominated. There's the Democratic candidate for the presidency. He said, I still believe in a place called Hope.

16:23So the general way of understanding Donald Trump through his background would not be controversial. And in fact, I bet Donald Trump would love to talk to us about New York. He built his own tower there. Let's not forget. But this is something very different, which I'm quite sure Donald Trump would not like. The specific links to the behaviors that we're going to hear more of now with my conversation with Kai Bird. Does it tell friends and foes of your president how to deal with him? If you understand Roy Cohn and the friendship with the young Donald Trump, does it give you an upper hand in dealing with him, in negotiating with him? He's a disruptive but also a consequential president. Donald Trump is a very consequential president. But I would argue that, you know, again, America has gone through these phases. We had a red scare in the 1920s. We had McCarthyism in the early 1950s. These were terrible episodes. And as a young historian, I thought that McCarthyism, for instance, was the absolute low point.

17:31But now I realize that part of what happened in McCarthyism was we did not defeat Joe McCarthy. We allowed his legacy to survive through the lives of people like Roy Cohn, who embraced the politics of divisiveness, the politics of the other, the politics of prejudice and racism. And yes, there's a direct tie between these men. But I would also argue that it's an aberration. You know, the pendulum will swing away. Donald Trump is an effective politician, but he doesn't have answers to this complicated world that we're living in today. And you can see, particularly in his dealings with his allies, the Canadians, the British, the South Koreans, he's alienating precisely the people that America needs to find its way in the 21st century.

18:38But we shall see. I think Trump is going to be, of course, out of the picture in 2028. But we'll see if his legacy lives on or whether America swings back to the traditions of tolerance and liberalism that we also admire. I mean, historians of your country remember that it was Charles Limberg who coined the phrase America first in the 1930s. You've always had this tug of war between how to address the world, how to isolate from the world. And your critique of Donald Trump is harsh. And in the time available, I want to say to you, forget your critique of Donald Trump. Tell me how my country can deal with him. I've got the king, I've got the prime minister. Can I use them as a nutcracker to get what I want from my country? I'm not sure I have an answer for that. I think what we're seeing though is the British and the Germans and the rest of Western Europe beginning to realize that they cannot, in this particular moment, rely on America.

19:49So they're relying on themselves. They're building their own alliances and rebuilding their own economies, reorienting their economies to different trading partners. And this is going to actually hurt American workers and consumers. But Europe is going to be maybe stronger for all the same. So finally we go back to New York. There's this strange frenemy relationship isn't there with the mayor of New York and Army and Donald Trump. And I wonder, I began by asking you about New Yorkers. And I wonder if the answer to my own question is that a New York solution is a good way to deal with the Donald Trump conundrum. He speaks New York and are you fascinated as we are here by that frenemy relationship between those two? Well, I don't think it's such a sunny relationship. I think Mamdani is a very smart politician. He treats Trump with sort of an arm's length, dividends, and humor.

20:57And that's absolutely important. It's a New York thing to treat your opponent with humor and sarcasm. But New York City is, let me say, the heart of the resistance in this country against the overreach and the excesses of the Trump administration. And they're going their own way. They're defending their own principles and will have better answers, I would argue, than those that are offered by the Republican right wing and the Maga wing of the Republican Party. Do you know who's going to be running for the Democrats in two years? Well, as I suggested, the pendulum may swing far to the left. Who knows? But what Trump has done has sort of been a politics of divisiveness where he's going around destroying institutions and destroying the bipartisan culture in American politics.

22:08And so that means that he's relying on an increasingly smaller percentage of the electorate. He's never had a majority of the American electorate behind him. But those partisans, those Maga partisans are indeed quite extreme, but also quite loyal to Trump. But I think it's gone. I think even they are beginning to, things are wearing thin for them. His behavior is becoming increasingly erratic. And this is what happened to Roy Cohn. I was just going to say, you know, Donald Trump was elected, was only with 70 million. And no one says he didn't win the last election. I just wonder if here's the most Roy Cohn thing about the situation. With two years out from the president's election, there is no Democratic candidate.

23:11And that's the kind of most Roy Cohn thing of all. There isn't really a clear front runner to take on Donald Trump, is there? Not yet, but you know, I'm a biographer of Jimmy Carter. And you know, Jimmy Carter was completely unknown in 1975, just 18 months before he became president. So this is a big and complicated country. And who knows who the candidate will be. But I would argue that it will be someone who knows how to stand up and tell the American people that the path that Donald Trump pointed them down is the wrong path. It's a path that where the personal whims of one man were ruling without regard to boundaries of decency and equity and intelligence.

24:14This is a president who hates the intelligentsia, hates universities, and has spent his life sort of trying to destroy those establishment institutions. And I would argue that again, that the pendulum is going to swing. But if you want to understand where Trump comes from, you have to understand that he is in his heart of hearts, Roy Cohn. Thank you for listening to the interview. For more in-depth conversations, search for the interview wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You'll find episodes with Russian journalist Dimitri Muratof, the former Sudanese leader Aisha Musa, and Ukrainian drone commander Robert Brovdi, plus many others. Until the next time, bye for now.