Donald Trump’s father reared him to have cutthroat ambition. But Roy Cohn taught him tactics. Plus:

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When President Donald Trump’s first Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from a federal investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia, in 2017, the President was angry. “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” he yelled. But Roy Cohn—an American scoundrel and the lawyer who helped send Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair, aided Senator Joseph McCarthy in implementing the Red Scare, and showed Trump the ropes in the real-estate business—was long gone.

Trump and Cohn had met forty-four years earlier, in 1973. The New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams later reported that her old friend Cohn had introduced her to his new protégé at a dinner party soon after. Trump was not yet thirty, and an ambitious outer-borough real-estate developer. In her column, Adams wrote that Cohn told her, “One day this kid is going to own New York.” Cohn, who was a closeted gay man, was invariably attracted to what could be called über-Gentiles—tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed. “Roy loved to surround himself with attractive straight men,” Robert S. Cohen, a divorce lawyer who’d worked for him in the sixties, observed. Trump—blond, six feet three—fit the bill.

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