Roy Cohn: The ‘evil’ master architect who mentored Donald Trump, as seen in The Apprentice
Decades before Trump erected his Tower, an insidiously well-connected New York power-player was cutting a ruthless path through US society, politics and courtroom battles. A new film charts Roy Cohn’s outsized influences on America and the 45th president, writes Sheila Flynn.
He was a lawyer with a two-syllable name, a colourfully complicated personal life and a Rasputin-like grip on United States politics – especially in New York. The very mention of Roy Cohn during his four decades of headline ubiquity could spark anything from anger to hatred to fear; his shadowy legend persists nearly 40 years after the death of a man dubbed a “new strain of sonofabitch” – by his own autobiography co-author, no less.
Now, those that missed Cohn’s infamous antics the first time around will meet him in a new film, The Apprentice, by director Ali Abbasi, which will be released in theaters in October. Pop culture darling Jeremy Strong from Succession stars as Cohn, the Joseph McCarthy lieutenant who created the blueprint that Donald Trump followed all the way to the presidency.
Director Ali Abbasi’s new film, The Apprentice, debuted at Cannes earlier this year and is set for theatrical release next month. It stars Jeremy Strong as political power-player Roy Cohn and Sebastian Stan as Donald Trump.
The Deadline announcement earlier this year, near the film’s Cannes debut, called the first Trump biopic “a mentor-protege story;” the summary on the festival site explained that it “charts a young Donald Trump’s ascent to power through a Faustian deal with the influential right-wing lawyer and political fixer” himself. A teaser still of the film shows the pair in the back of a town car, Strong as Cohn fixing his steely eyes on Sebastian Stan, who plays Trump.
Trump’s name inspires a range of emotions mirroring those elicited by any mention of Cohn. The future 45th president was guided and represented by the Bronx-raised lawyer during his ascent through the ranks of New York business and society; one need only give a cursory read of Cohn’s eponymous memoir to see Trumpisms. The word “losers?” It’s on the third page of Chapter One. “Lousy?” It’s on Page 37.
“Donald Trump is Roy Cohn,” Matthew Tyrnauer, director of the 2019 documentary Where’s My Roy Cohn, said in an interview with NPR the year of his film’s release. “He completely absorbed all of the lessons of Cohn, which were attack, always double down, accuse your accusers of what you are guilty of, and winning is everything,” Tyrnauer continued. “And Trump absorbed these lessons and has applied them in every aspect of his life and career.”
Cohn worked on his eponymous memoir with journalist Sidney Zion, who notes a “point of order” after Chapter 11 – when the book turns “from Roy Cohn telling the Roy Cohn Story to me telling Roy Cohn stories” as the lawyer faded with illness. Even before Cohn gleefully recounted within the book’s pages his legal battles against indictments, he also took a stab at imagining his own obituary on the same opening page. He used words like “notorious,” “explorer” and “writer.”
Cohn rightly predicted that most obituaries would recall him as “McCarthy Investigations Aide” – because, years before Cohn’s tutelage of Trump, he first became a household name and tabloid staple through his pivotal role in one of America’s greatest witch-hunts.
The McCarthy hearings may have launched Cohn into adversarial infamy, but his shrewd and manipulative brand of power-brokering had its roots far earlier. The only child of a well-connected Bronx judge and doting Jewish mother, Cohn wrote in his memoir that “virtually every heavy hitter in politics, law, the judiciary made it to our apartment while I was growing up.”