Roy Cohn was of New York, but he deeply resented New York’s intellectuals, its universities, and its élite law firms. Donald Trump has always felt the same resentment.
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker

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All I own are the clothes on my back and some personal possessions. I have no assets. I want no assets, and I need no assets. My parents are dead. I am not married, I have no kids. I don’t need an estate. If anything happens to me, the law firm has a one-million-dollar policy on my life.
~ Roy Cohn via The New Yorker

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Almost thirty years later, a tenant living in one of Fred Trump’s first major developments, the Beach Haven apartment complex, in Brooklyn, was so disturbed by the racial discrimination he observed from the management that he wrote a song about it. The song was called “Old Man Trump.” The tenant was Woody Guthrie.
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker

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Donald Trump’s father had reared him to have cutthroat ambition. But Roy Cohn taught him tactics.
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker

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If the charge is that Donald Trump is unsophisticated, they are in some ways right. If you go with him to see an art collection, he’s not that interested. He’d rather look out the windows at buildings.
~ Roy Cohn via The New Yorker

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Roy Cohn is a man who has triumphed over his tormentors, and he deserves the credit we are here to give him so enthusiastically.
~ William F. Buckley, Jr. via The New Yorker

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New York Mayor Ed Koch was annoyed, and he later referred to Donald Trump as “piggy, piggy, piggy.” In return, Trump called him a moron. The Mayor, he said, was “extremely nasty, mean-spirited, and very vicious, an extremely disloyal human being.”
~ Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark via The New Yorker

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Roy Cohn was a master of situational immorality. He had rules about how to exercise power. You would always try to goad your enemies into being the worst they possibly could be and then turn that against them, so that Cohn would actually look like the good guy, which he virtually never was.
~ Sam Roberts, city politics reporter for the Daily News via The New Yorker

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Roy Cohn loved to surround himself with attractive straight men.
~ Robert S. Cohen via The New Yorker

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