The Wrong Mentor to the Worst Person

"Where's my Roy Cohn?"
-- allegedly spoken by donald trump, desperately looking for a mob lawyer to save his ass while in the White House.

trump's prediction that the New York District Attorney would indict him Tuesday didn't pan out - extra witness testimony is delaying the matter - but that doesn't mean trump is off of the hot seat this week.

The Special Counsel investigation into trump's mishandling of classified documents sped up this week as the court overseeing the matter issued rulings that overturned the attorney-client privileges between donald trump and Evan Corcoran.

Chief Judge “Howell found that prosecutors showed ‘sufficient’ evidence that Trump ‘intentionally concealed’ the existence of additional classified documents from Corcoran, sources said, putting Corcoran in an unwitting position to deceive the government.”https://t.co/AG01TYhVwK

— Pete Strzok (@petestrzok) March 21, 2023

For a judge to exempt any attorney-client privilege, they have to be convinced that the client and attorney were committing crimes - in Corcoran's situation, because trump lied to him - in an attempt to hide the illegality of their acts. This is a big fucking deal, because Judge Howell is pretty much establishing what trump did with classified documents at Mar-A-Lago - stashing them, keeping them away from the government agencies they should have gone to, and possibly copying/scanning those documents for sharing - were straight-up crimes.

This isn't the first time trump's been caught employing his lawyers - hi again, Michael Cohen! - to commit crimes for him, willingly or otherwise. It begs the question "hey lawyers, why are you working for an asshole who's gonna get you disbarred for doing his dirty work for him?"

I digress.

The reason I opened this article quoting trump's desire for a Roy Cohn figure to return to his life is to point out the destruction that Cohn himself left behind in his wake. A brief description of Cohn's own political and legal career foreshadows the gaslighting, bullying, grandstanding nature of trump's own disastrous train wreck of a Presidency. 

It's not hard to imagine how Cohn taught trump the tricks of the legal system - to where trump laughed at civil lawsuits and bankruptcy rulings - and created a monster to inherit Cohn's own dark desires for respect and power.

The problem is trump never paid attention to how Roy Cohn fell from grace: Cohn getting disbarred for attempting to lie his way into a dying man's will; Cohn's reputation shattered as the secrets of the McCarthy Era came out, exposing his own hypocrisies and lies; Cohn refusing to face the reality of his AIDS infection and inglorious death.

Cohn just refused to accept reality. He wanted to pummel it - and everyone in his way - into submission by his will alone, facts be damned. Even when it means lying to himself about what was happening.

It's a lesson Cohn taught trump all too well. It's a problem for the rest of us that trump doesn't accept how Cohn's lessons were wrong, that they all led to self-destruction.

Problem is, trump is willing to charge into that self-destruction convinced he and he alone can win, all the while dragging the rest of us down into the firepits with him.

Roy Cohn. The wrong American serving as mentor to the worst American. Gods help us.

Paul Harvey parody: ...and that little boy who nobody liked grew up to be... Roy Cohn!
Abe Simpson: WOW!
Harvey parody: And now you know the rest of the story!

-- "Homer's Barbershop Quartet," The Simpsons