Roy Cohn, the lawyer who helped Donald Trump, former president of the United States, in his rise to power

The Apprentice (“The Apprentice”), one of the most prominent films in the competition at the last Cannes Festival, borrows its title from reality show that starred Donald Trump for years and turns it around.

According to the criteria of

In the film the apprentice is Trump himself, a young businessman hardened in the corridors of power and greatly influenced by an unscrupulous lawyer named Roy Cohn.

Today Cohn is known for the lessons he gave to Trump, but even before that he was a huge and influential figure in US politics and culture.

Cohn was a gay man who persecuted other homosexuals to remove them from government positions. in what was known as the Lilac Terror of the 1950s. Throughout his life, he dedicated himself to intimidating many people.

He died of AIDS in 1986, publicly insisting that he had liver cancer and denying to the end that he was gay, despite taking his lovers to public events.

Over the years he has been presented as an angry and threatening character in the play Angels in Americaby Tony Kushner, and in the recent miniseries Fellow Travelers.

He was even the inspiration for the unnamed obnoxious blue-haired lawyer who defends Mr. Burns on “The Simpsons.”

Magazine esquire noted that Cohn “galloped through the second half of the 20th century like a malevolent Forrest Gump.”

“Vampire life after death”

Thomas Mallon wrote the novel in 2006 Fellow Travellers, on which the aforementioned miniseries is based.

“A surprise (not evident when I started the novel 20 years ago) is that Cohn would end up having a vampire afterlife thanks to Trump,” Mallon told the BBC.

Cohn keeps coming back from the dead, Mallon says: “Considering that he personally affected Trump’s thinking and behavior, you realize that Cohn has had an impact – albeit at intervals – on the country, for 70 years“.

Cohn was, in some ways, brilliant. He was barely 20 when as deputy prosecutor in 1951, he helped engineer the conviction and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for being Soviet spies, and acknowledged using illicit conversations with the judge in the case to obtain the death penalty.

Soon after, he became known as a senior advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s committee that expelled suspected communist officials from the American government.

In New York during the 1970s and 1980s, he partied at the famous Studio 54 nightclub, and was influential as a friend of the famous and powerful, including Barbara Walters, Andy Warhol, and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.

As a lawyer, he represented both mafia bosses and Trump, and weeks before his death he was disbarred for, among several crimes, defrauding some of his clients..

He was also well known for his habit of stealing food from other people’s plates, even in the fanciest restaurants. (Narcissism or just bad table manners? Probably both.)

Donald J. Trump

His alliance with Trump began in the early 1970s, when the US government sued the former president and his father for discriminating against black tenants in the apartments they managed.

Cohn had Trump countersue the Justice Department.

The case was resolved with a settlement and began a pattern of litigation that helped define Trump’s career in business and later in politics.

An article from Washington Post about Cohn’s influence that was published during the 2016 US presidential campaign, had the headline “The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear,” and summarized the lesson the lawyer gave him to the future president as “a simple formula: attack, counterattack and never apologize”.

Cohn was also an expert in media manipulation.

His figure is analyzed in the 2019 documentary “Where is my Roy Cohn?”.

Although it does not focus on Trump, the film takes its title from one of his now-famous comments. When former Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from an investigation focused on possible Russian interference in the 2016 election (a decision Trump considered disloyal), he reportedly angrily asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

Trump’s question has become a recurring element of recent articles about his legal team, regarding his criminal trial in New York, in which he was found guilty.

The documentary includes many archival clips of Cohn from the 1950s and later.

With chilling calm, He boasted on a television show in the 1970s that his clients were contracting with him for what he called the “value of fear,” because his opponents knew they would have to face “all kinds of terrible consequences.”

In popular culture

Cohn had virtually disappeared from public consciousness until the release of Angels in America in 1991.

One of Kushner’s wise choices in his visionary play was to depict Cohn on his deathbed, a metaphor for the hypocrisy of the Reagan era.

Al Pacino offers one of his best performances in the miniseries Angels in America by Mike Nichols as a Cohn full of conviction, committed to his own lies, but with a touch of pathos. He is a patient who yells at the doctor who diagnoses him with AIDS: “I will destroy him” if he mentions AIDS again.

This Cohn insists, as in real life, that he is not gay even though he slept with men, because he was powerful and, he said, “homosexuals are men who have no influence.”

Trump allies have a different view of Cohn’s personality and tactics, although they rarely name him.

An exception was made by former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who wrote a foreword for the 2023 reissue of Nicholas von Hoffman’s biography of Cohn titled Citizen Cohn.

In the preface Bannon writes that Cohn is “one of the most extraordinary, demonized and misunderstood figures in 20th century politics.”

He then mentions the allegations against Trump and says that “the president is fighting back,” just as Cohn would have done. “Is it any wonder President Trump asks ‘Where’s my Roy Cohn?'” Bannon writes.

Beam click here to read more stories from BBC News Mundo.

And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and activate them.