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Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn

Started by GSOgymrat, April 30, 2018, 04:04:51 PM

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GSOgymrat

This is a long but interesting article on the relationship between Donald Trump and Roy "Polestar of Human Evil" Cohn and their shared modi operandi. I initially was going to just send this to Baruch but then thought others might be interested. The article describes the snake pit of New York favor banking, power broking, lies, media manipulation and shady deals. Author Frank Rich doesn't give anyone a pass.

Some excerpts I liked:

The Original Donald Trump - 
The New York Establishment will ignore unscrupulous acts to serve its interests â€" just look how it treated Roy Cohn, onetime lawyer to the president.

By Frank Rich

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsletter_axiosam&stream=top-stories

Cohn thrived throughout a New York second act rife with indictments and scandals that included accusations of multiple bank- and securities-law violations, perennial tax evasion, bribery, extortion, theft, and even precipitating the death of a young man in a suspicious fire. Trump may never have been suspected of manslaughter, but he also flourished for decades despite being a shameless lawbreaker, tax evader, liar, racist, bankruptcy aficionado, and hypocrite notorious for his mob connections, transactional sexual promiscuity, and utter disregard for rules, scruples, and morals. Indeed, Trump triumphed despite having all of Cohn’s debits, wartime draft dodging included, but none of his assets â€" legal cunning, erudition, a sense of humor, brainpower, and loyalty. (The putz-cum-fixer Michael Cohen, who is to Cohn what Dan Quayle was to Jack Kennedy, boasts none of these attributes either.) And Trump, like Cohn, got away with it all under the ostensibly pitiless magnifying glass of New York. Much as one hates to concede it, it’s no small achievement that he succeeded where so many of his betters failed in becoming the first New Yorker to catapult himself to the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt. ...

It was Democrats in New York who taught both Cohn and Trump that they could buy off politicians and try to get away with anything. Cohn’s father, Al, was a Bronx and then New York State Supreme Court judge. The elder Cohn’s roots in the party’s machine were hardwired into his son: Young Roy figured out how to pull strings to fix a parking ticket for a teacher while still in high school. Trump grew up with a father who had been intertwined with the Brooklyn Democratic machine while building his residential-real-estate empire. By the time the clubhouse hack Beame arrived in City Hall in 1974 after the reform mayoralty of John Lindsay, Fred Trump had known him for 30 years. The new mayor immediately gave both Trumps a license to steal by declaring that “whatever Donald and Fred want, they have my complete backing.” Never mind, as the Trump biographers Michael Kranish and Marc Fisher observed, that Donald Trump didn’t have the financing to snag the real-estate prize he then sought, the properties of the bankrupt Penn Central railroad. The Beame deputy mayor Stanley Friedman pushed through an enormous 40-year, $400 million tax abatement â€" this at the city’s bankrupt nadir â€" and in his waning weeks in office fast-tracked the agency approvals Trump needed to rebuild the decrepit old Commodore Hotel as the Grand Hyatt, his first big deal. Roy Cohn served as the closer: The day after the Beame administration was succeeded by Ed Koch’s in 1978, Friedman was paid off for his Trump handiwork with a new job as a partner in Cohn’s law firm. (It was not enough to save Friedman from federal prison a decade later, when he was convicted in unrelated kickback scandals the year after Cohn’s death.)...

Trump practiced bigotry on a grand scale, was a world-class liar, and ripped off customers, investors, and the city itself. Yet for many among New York’s upper register, there was no horror he could commit that would merit his excommunication. As with Cohn before him, the more outrageously and reprehensibly Trump behaved, the more the top rungs of society were titillated by him. They could cop out of any moral judgments or actions by rationalizing him as an entertaining con man: a cheesy, cynical, dumbed-down Gatsby who fit the city’s tacky 1980s Gilded Age much as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s more romantic prototype had the soigné Jazz Age of the 1920s. And so most of those who might have stopped Trump gawked like the rest of us as he scrambled up the city’s ladder, grabbing anything that wasn’t nailed down. ...

During his campaign, Trump made a cause out of the corruption intrinsic to pay-for-play political donations like those he used to give. “Nobody knows the system better than me,” he claimed, “which is why I alone can fix it.” The second half of that sentence was a lie, but the first was true. As he’d elaborate in pitch-perfect Cohn-speak, he gave to “everybody” because “when I want something, I get it. When I call, they kiss my ass.” At the first Republican presidential debate in August 2015, he fine-tuned his target: “Well, I’ll tell you what, with Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice, because I gave.” ...

SGOS

Quote from: GSOgymrat on April 30, 2018, 04:04:51 PM
I initially was going to just send this to Baruch but then thought others might be interested.
I was.  Thank you.

Baruch

#2
Quote from: SGOS on April 30, 2018, 04:23:51 PM
I was.  Thank you.

People are crooked assholes.  Trump is a person.  Therefore Trump is a crooked asshole.  Which is why I didn't vote for him.  And I had no interest in the Comet Pizza Party either.  Eat that with your Walnut Sauce.

If Trump ran drug trade thru NYC and rode with Jeffrey Epstein Air Express (at least once) then it is OK for Bill and Hillary to do it too, at least in Arkansas

Y'all gotta get over this Civics101 bullshit.  Decide who you want to rob, assault and murder .. and get to work.  Join Uncle Sam, and he will arrange for you to do that, no thought on your part required.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Sal1981

A lot of namedropping. I don't know about most of those people in the article, but makes for good reading nonetheless.

Baruch

Quote from: Sal1981 on May 01, 2018, 01:49:31 AM
A lot of namedropping. I don't know about most of those people in the article, but makes for good reading nonetheless.

New Yorkers probably not only know those names, but the color of their underwear.  But I am not a Big Apple either.

Anything involving business or government is taken straight from True Crime magazine.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Unbeliever

#5
Why do they call New York "the big apple"?



[edit]Oh, never mind, I googled.[/edit]
God Not Found
"There is a sucker born-again every minute." - C. Spellman

Mike Cl

Quote from: Unbeliever on May 01, 2018, 01:20:04 PM
Why do they call New York "the big apple"?



[edit]Oh, never mind, I googled.[/edit]
I just googled, too.  But I'm not going to never mind--so for others, here is what I found:

The earliest known usage of 'big apple' appears in the book The Wayfarer in New York (1909), in which author Edward S. Martin writes:

Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city.... It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.[
Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able?<br />Then he is not omnipotent,<br />Is he able but not willing?<br />Then whence cometh evil?<br />Is he neither able or willing?<br />Then why call him god?

Baruch

Quote from: Mike Cl on May 01, 2018, 03:35:13 PM
I just googled, too.  But I'm not going to never mind--so for others, here is what I found:

The earliest known usage of 'big apple' appears in the book The Wayfarer in New York (1909), in which author Edward S. Martin writes:

Kansas is apt to see in New York a greedy city.... It inclines to think that the big apple gets a disproportionate share of the national sap.[

NYC is "A sucked orange" per Emerson in 1860.  Meaning, the good part is gone, but the rind might still be used to make marmalade?

There is a war between cities and the countryside.  The victory of the city is Pyrrhic ... in the end the city will die, as did Babylon.
Ha’át’íísh baa naniná?
Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
What are you doing?
Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Cavebear

Trump is getting ready to throw "his old friend" Cohn "under the bus".  He distanced himself recently saying that Cohn "did little actual work for him".  That means Cohn is trump-dumped!

Another bitter ex-trumpian ready for Mueller to learn from on pain of jail time...
Atheist born, atheist bred.  And when I die, atheist dead!