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The most influential person in Donald Trump’s life isn’t his mother or father or a beloved teacher or coach.
It’s Roy Cohn — the lawyer/fixer who Trump met when he was in his late 20s and who molded him into the man that successfully sought the presidency not once but twice.
“Roy was probably his closest friend and a major influence,” Kai Bird, the author of a new book on Cohn called “American Scoundrel,” told me in a Substack Live on Monday afternoon. “And in my phone interviews with Trump, he made clear that he still admires Roy Cohn, misses him, misses his... his presence, his friendship. I mean, they used to have phone calls like a dozen times a day.”
In fact, it was Cohn, more than any other person, who was responsible for landing Trump a book deal in the late 1980s that became “The Art of the Deal.”
As Bird tells it, Cohn was friendly with S.I. Newhouse, the media magnate who owned a series of magazines, newspapers and book publishers. Cohn told Newhouse that he should offer this up-and-coming real estate developer a deal to write a memoir. The rest is history.
Bird and I spent more than 30 minutes chatting about the book, which is already #2 on the New York Times bestseller list. Among the topics we covered:
🎸 How REM’s Michael Stipe played a major role in Bird’s research into Cohn
📂 Why he sued the FBI to access more than 10,000 pages of Cohn’s file
📰 Why Cohn graced the cover of Time magazine when he was only 27 years old
😤 What Cohn taught Trump about the “politics of resentment”
📞 What Trump said about Cohn in four(!) separate telephone interviews with Bird
Watch or listen to the whole thing above. And BUY THE BOOK!
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