Marrakech – In Trump’s case, it was Roy Cohn in a pinstripe suit and a perpetual snarl.
Long before red hats, gold towers, or the art of any deal, Donald Trump was just another real estate heir with big dreams and an even bigger ego.
Then, in the mid-1970s, he met Roy Cohn — a man who didn’t just rewrite the rules of power, but set them on fire and danced in the ashes.
Roy Cohn wasn’t your typical mentor. He was the legal pitbull who once whispered in the ear of Joseph McCarthy during the Red Scare, the fixer for mob bosses and high society alike, and the type of lawyer who made courtrooms feel more like boxing rings.
When the Trump family got slapped with a federal discrimination lawsuit in 1973, Cohn didn’t suggest settling — he suggested fighting. Hard. Loud. Dirty.
And fight they did.
From that moment, Cohn became Trump’s consigliere and crash course in the art of the power play. His three golden rules? Hit first, hit hard, and never, ever admit defeat.
Apologizing was for priests and politicians — not for empire-builders.
I couldn’t help but wonder… when does strategy become persona?
Trump didn’t just take notes from Cohn — he absorbed him. Roy taught him to countersue anyone who threatened him, to call the press before they called you, and to treat the truth like an optional accessory.
It wasn’t about being right. It was about winning the room, the headline, the cocktail party.
Over time, Trump stopped playing by Cohn’s rules and started living by them.
He became the brand, the bulldozer, the billionaire enigma — built not just on buildings, but on bravado.
And when he entered the White House decades later, facing investigations and critics on all fronts, his lament wasn’t presidential: it was personal.
“Where’s my Roy Cohn?”
Somewhere between legal battles and late-night headlines, Trump lost the man who taught him how to win.
Cohn had died in 1986, disbarred, disgraced, and battling AIDS — a disease he publicly denied while privately withering from it.
But his legacy lived on, not in law books, but in a president who took his tactics to the biggest stage on earth.
Cohn was the devil on Trump’s shoulder — and maybe, in some ways, still is.
Because while most mentors offer wisdom, guidance, and maybe a few networking opportunities… Roy Cohn handed Trump a playbook of power, with a cover that read:
“Be ruthless. Be loud. Be untouchable.”
And darling, didn’t he read it cover to cover?
