The Root of all Evil

Cohn and McCarthy

Those of you following my blog know that I trace Trump and the core of his evil back to Joe McCarthy’s Red-Baiting assistant and consiglere to mob families, New York lawyer Roy Cohn.  Simplified, Cohn who was ultimately disbarred before dying of AIDS, taught Trump everything he knows about manipulating the press and the judiciary and using misinformation, smear, and innuendo to win in the game of life.  As Cohn taught, a willingness to ruthlessly jettison all principles gave one an important edge.  See my earlier pieces at Donald Trump and Organized Crime and Blumenthal’s Short History of the Trump Family.  More recently, I have noted that Trump’s original core of loyalists,  Roger Stone and Paul Manafort, were also members of the Roy Cohn sphere.  See Leave No Stone Unturned.   And in yesterday’s blog, I link to an article by Andras Gollner, showing how Trump’s collusion with Putin and the Russians appears to have been routed through the “back door” of Budapest where both Trump operative Arthur J. Finkelstein and the Eastern European offices of the modern Russian KGB – Putin’s FSB – are located.  See Andras Gollner exposes Trump.  Gollner links Finkelstein to the early Trump-Cohn  days.

So I thought it only reasonable to also provide you with the link to this April 14 New Yorker article by Marcus Baram, “EAVESDROPPING ON ROY COHN AND DONALD TRUMP.”  Baram interestingly also links Fox TV oligarch Rupert Murdoch to the Trump-Roy Cohn days.  Here’s an excerpt for the sort of stuff you will miss if you don’t check out Baram: 

“[Former Cohn employee Christine] Seymour also describes some of Cohn’s political dirty tricks, including that he had researched Geraldine Ferraro, the 1984 Democratic Vice-Presidential nominee, with the assistance of Trump’s adviser Roger Stone. (‘Roger Stone—worked with Roy very heavily before and after elections. Was the one with Roy to find out the dirt on the Ferraros.]) Stone, who first met Trump through Cohn, initially did not think much of the brash young real-estate developer, Seymour’s notes indicate. ‘Roger did not like Donald Trump or his new house, told me they were losers, but if Roy used them, he would, too,’ she writes. When I recently asked Stone about this, he said the “notes make no sense,” adding, ‘I was very impressed with Donald Trump when I met him.'”

Read on and you will find that Christine Seymour, who was profiled in a column titled “Savvy Chris Spills the Beans on Roy Cohn”  and who, five months later, was on the verge of publishing a Roy Cohn tell-all, died suddenly on October 20, 1994,when her car crashed head-on with a tractor-trailer.  

Check it out if you were entertaining doubts about the nature of the swamp from which Trump arose.  Or for the entertainment if you are so inclined.