LEAST EDUCATED STATES - LOOK AT REPUBLICAN COTROLLED STATES

 

THIS DEFINES REPUBLICAN GOVERNANCE!

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August 25, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

 

August 25, 2023 HEATHER COX RICHARDSON AUG 26 Tomorrow, civil rights activists will gather at the National Mall in Washington, D.C., both to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and to emphasize that the struggle for civil rights is ongoing. Monday, August 28, is the actual anniversary of the 1963 march, which is famous today primarily because it was the occasion when the final speaker, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and delivered what became known as the “I Have a Dream” speech. While that speech is often excerpted to sound like King’s concerns were simply about the way individuals thought about race, in fact, the march’s organizers, Black labor leader A. Philip Randolph and civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, focused on economic discrimination and the lack of decent jobs for Black Americans. In the process of organizing the march, they brought on board not only civil rights organizers but also white labor organizer Walter Reuther, the head of the United Auto Workers. King acknowledged the economic focus of the march when he centered his speech around the idea that Black Americans had received “a promissory note” that had become “a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.” “But,” he said, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” Dr. King was not the only speaker that day; he anchored the event. Before him spoke the chair of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a young John Lewis. Just 23 years old, he had been one of the thirteen original Freedom Riders, white and black students traveling together from Washington, D.C., to New Orleans in 1961 to challenge segregation. “It was very violent. I thought I was going to die. I was left lying at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery unconscious,” Lewis later recalled. At the Washington march, Lewis railed against the systems that kept Black Americans in poverty and permitted white men to commit violence against them, and explained that the remedy for the economic deprivation and racial violence Black Americans suffered was not in the civil rights bill proposed by the administration of President John F. Kennedy, but in the power of peaceful demonstrations and the vote. “‘ONE MAN, ONE VOTE’...must be our [cry],” he told the crowd. “The revolution is at hand, and we must free ourselves of the chains of political and economic slavery,” Lewis said. “The nonviolent revolution is saying, ‘We will not wait for the courts to act, for we have been waiting for hundreds of years. We will not wait for the president, the Justice Department, nor Congress, but we will take matters into our own hands and create a source of power, outside of any national structure, that could and would assure us a victory.’” The March on Washington gave national media coverage to the civil rights movement, and it, along with the assassination of President Kennedy less than three months later and the disappearance of three young men registering Black Americans to vote in Mississippi in 1964, gave momentum to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which outlawed racial discrimination and protected voting rights. Americans determined to bring that law to life set out to increase the voting registration efforts they had been making for years. Near Selma, Alabama, in February 1965, white law enforcement officers beat and shot an unarmed 26-year-old, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was marching for voting rights. He died eight days later. Black leaders in Selma planned to march the 54 miles from Selma to the state capitol at Montgomery to draw attention to the murder and to voter suppression. As Lewis and 600 marchers stopped to pray at the end of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for a Confederate brigadier general, grand dragon of the Alabama Ku Klux Klan, and U.S. senator, mounted police troopers charged them with clubs and bullwhips. They fractured Lewis’s skull. After the Selma attack, President Lyndon Baines Johnson called for Congress to pass a national voting rights bill. By a bipartisan vote, it did so, and on August 6, 1965, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act authorizing federal supervision of voter registration in districts where African Americans were historically underrepresented. The federal protection of minority voting was a game changer, and and opponents fought it. Since Reconstruction, reactionary racists had maintained that Black voters would elect lawmakers who would give them benefits that could only be paid for through tax levies on those with property, which generally meant white men. Black voting, they insisted, would lead to a redistribution of wealth and thus was essentially socialism. As the Democratic Party under Johnson moved away from its historic racism, those who insisted that Black voting was socialism and segregation should be the law of the land began to swing behind the Republicans, whose opposition to government regulation of business and provision of a basic social safety net made them take a stand against a powerful federal government. Once entrenched in the Republican Party, the idea that minority voting meant a redistribution of wealth led party leaders both to whittle away at federal power and to insist that Black and Brown voters were illegitimate. By 1986, Republicans talked of cutting down Black voting with a “ballot integrity” initiative, and they bitterly opposed the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, more popularly known as the Motor-Voter Act, which Democrats passed to make it easier to register to vote at certain state offices. The following year, losing Republican candidates argued they had lost because of “voter fraud,” and in 1996, House and Senate Republicans launched yearlong investigations into elections that they insisted, without evidence, Democrats had stolen thanks to illegal voters. By 2013 the quest to purge minority voters led to the Supreme Court’s Shelby County v. Holder decision gutting the provision of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required the Department of Justice to sign off on changes to voting in states with histories of racial discrimination. Ultimately, in late 2020, Republicans led by then-incumbent president Donald Trump organized to deprive Americans, overwhelmingly minority Americans in places like Fulton County, Georgia, and Detroit, of their vote. As the federal indictment for his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election reads, he and his co-conspirators tried “to injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate one more more persons in the free exercise and enjoyment of a right and privilege secured to them by the Constitution and laws of the United States—that is, the right to vote, and to have one’s vote counted.” As civil rights leaders gather in Washington, D.C., today, they hope to emphasize that voting rights remain central to racial and economic equality. According to the voting-rights-focused Brennan Center, since 2013, 29 states have added 94 restrictions on the right to vote, and now House Republicans have proposed what they call the “American Confidence in Elections” Act, or ACE, which limits mail-in ballots and drop boxes, prohibits taking food and water to those waiting in line to vote, lifts remaining restrictions on campaign spending, and abolishes federal efforts to combat disinformation. Although Republicans point to increased voting in 2022 to insist that such measures don’t hurt voting rates, the Brennan Center showed that under Georgia’s new rules, the gap between white voting and nonwhite voting is the highest it’s been since at least 2014: white voting was 8.6 percentage points higher than nonwhite voting in 2022. In contrast, Senate Democrats have reintroduced the Freedom to Vote Act, which sets national standards to protect voting access, protects election officials and workers (who have experienced attacks since 2020), prohibits partisan gerrymandering, and cuts back on the dark money that floods our elections since the Supreme Court permitted it in its 2010 Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (FEC) decision. When the House passed a version of the Freedom to Vote Act in 2021, every Republican in the Senate voted it down. And yet, the Freedom to Vote Act is popular, with a supermajority of likely voters—70%— supporting its provisions shortly after it was first introduced in 2021. Protecting the vote is a cause behind which the Biden administration, particularly Vice President Kamala Harris, stands. In 2022, speaking in the Georgia district that elected John Lewis to Congress, Harris warned that we must not be deceived into thinking laws that make it harder to vote are normal, and she noted that those pushing such laws “are not only putting in place obstacles to the ballot box, they are also working to interfere with our elections to get the outcomes they want and to discredit those they don’t. That is not how a democracy should work.” At tomorrow’s march, the Reverend Dr. King’s son Martin Luther King III and his wife Arndrea Waters King say they plan to call on Congress to pass voting rights legislation. “This is not about issues for one group or one ethnic group,” Mr. King said. “It’s about Americans. It’s about creating a climate for America to fulfill its true promise for all of its citizens.” — Notes: https://www.axios.com/local/washington-dc/2023/08/24/march-on-washington-national-mall https://www.npr.org/2010/01/18/122701268/i-have-a-dream-speech-in-its-entirety https://snccdigital.org/inside-sncc/policy-statements/march-washington-speech/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/08/01/us/politics/trump-jan-6-indictment-2020-election-annotated.html https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/georgias-racial-turnout-gap-grew-2022 https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/citizens-united-explained https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2021/9/24/a-supermajority-of-voters-support-the-freedom-to-vote-act https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/05/15/march-on-washington-60th-anniversary-martin-luther-king-jr-family/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/01/11/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-on-protecting-the-right-to-vote/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/03/06/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-to-commemorate-the-57th-anniversary-of-bloody-sunday/ https://edition.cnn.com/2001/US/05/10/access.lewis.freedom.rides/ https://www.klobuchar.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2023/7/klobuchar-colleagues-introduce-legislation-to-protect-the-freedom-to-vote-and-strengthen-our-democracy

PPP LOANS

PLEASE KEEP SHARING FOR THE WHINING REPUBLICANS WHO COMPLAIN ABOUT PRESIDENT BIDEN HELPING STRUGGLING AMERICANS and while you're at it, provide a list of what these Greedy Leeches have done for Americans.

A reminder for you Republicans clutching your pearls - why didn't you get upset about bailing out these members of the Republican Congress with our taxes? I guess it's different when it might actually help working class citizens.. Y'all always take the bait your social media feeds show it...

 

PPP LOANS STUDENT LOANS

 

REPUBLICANS, COUNTRY CLUBS, THE WEALTHY soaked taxpayers for PPP LOANS.....

Let's work to support AMERICANS with STUDENT LOAN FORGIVENESS!

Never mind the GOP PROPAGANDA!

AMERICA needs an educated workforce - let's restore education funding.

  ·

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON AUGUST 2022

 

excerpts from HEATHER COX RICHARDSON:

Today, legal news about the former president and members of his team revealed a group of people who appear to have ignored the law.

The stories began with the release of the Department of Justice (DOJ) memo written for Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr arguing that Trump should not be charged with obstruction of justice over his attempts to shut down the Russia investigation despite his firing of Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey, urging of witnesses not to “flip,” hints of pardons to those who stayed quiet, and so on. The memo seems clearly to have been a whitewash to justify Barr’s predetermined decision not to prosecute, illustrating the dangerous politicization of the DOJ.

The memo argued that because special counsel Robert Mueller did not find enough evidence to charge Trump with conspiring with Russia, there was no crime committed, and thus Trump could not be charged with obstruction. In fact, Mueller noted in the report that the investigation was hampered by the president’s allies who refused to cooperate. Andrew Weissman, a 20-year veteran of the Department of Justice who worked on the Mueller investigation, concluded: “Key ‘reasoning’ of…memo: if you successfully obstruct an investigation, you cannot be charged with obstruction as you were not charged with the crime under investigation. Future defendants will have a field day with this memo unless DOJ repudiates it soon.”

Harry Litman, former U.S. attorney and now legal affairs columnist for the Los Angeles Times, noted that the principal author of the memo, Steven Engel, “is too good a lawyer not to have known what was going on. In a way, the most important words in the memo are the first 3: ‘at your request.’ This was a political mission.”

And then there is the attempt of Republican operatives to smear their opponents. Today, the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York announced that two people have pleaded guilty to stealing the diary and other personal property of then-candidate Joe Biden’s daughter and selling it for $40,000 to James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas. In the process, they transported the material across state lines and then, at the request of the person to whom they sold it, went back to get more. They pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit interstate transportation of stolen property, and will cooperate with authorities.

The attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results is also in legal news.

Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) is arguing in court that the judge should not let a grand jury question the senator “on all the topics” covered by its recent subpoena of his testimony in the investigation of the Trump campaign’s attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election results in Georgia. Graham argues that the Speech or Debate Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which says that congress members “shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place,” means he cannot be questioned about his two phone calls to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger about throwing out mail-in ballots in that state.

For Graham’s argument to prevail, he will have to convince the court that his calls to Raffensperger were part of his legitimate congressional work, rather than part of the efforts of Trump’s campaign to overturn the election, actions outside the scope of Graham’s congressional duties.

Lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, who helped to invent the false electors plan to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is refusing to talk to the grand jury, arguing that he has an attorney-client relationship with the Trump campaign and saying the campaign had “instructed” him to maintain confidentiality. But Chesebro never received any payment, and it is unclear whether he was officially working for the campaign.

Meanwhile, Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis filed petitions today to require Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, Meadows ally James “Phil” Waldron, and Trump campaign advisor Boris Epshteyn to testify before the special grand jury next month.

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON AUGUST 2022

 

LOOK AT THE PPE $$$ MAGA REPUBLICANS RECEIVED WHILE CONDEMNING STUDENT LOAN DEBT CANCELLATION!

SHARE! THESE MAGA REPUBLICANS OPPOSE ANYTHING THAT BENEFITS AMERICANS!

excerpts from HEATHER COX RICHARDSON:

Finally, the top secret documents Trump stole from the government: Today the DOJ submitted to the court a redacted version of the affidavit it used to obtain a search warrant for Trump’s Florida property Mar-a-Lago earlier this month. The judge has ordered the release of the document by noon tomorrow. Trump had publicly demanded the release of the affidavit but had not actually asked the court to release it. Instead, he has whipped up his followers against the FBI.

With these headlines from the Republican Party, and coming on the heels of a spectacular few months for the Democrats, the Biden administration came out today swinging against MAGA Republicans.

First, after a day of Republican congress members railing against yesterday’s educational loan forgiveness of up to $20,000 for Pell Grant recipients and $10,000 for others, the White House tweeted a thread of those members alongside the amount of Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) money those individuals were forgiven.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said: “For our government just to say ok your debt is completely forgiven.. it’s completely unfair.” Greene had $183,504 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Vern Buchanan (R-FL) said: “Biden’s reckless, unilateral student loan giveaway is unfair to the 87 percent of Americans without student loan debt and those who played by the rules.” Buchanan had more than $2.3 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) said: “We do not need farmers and ranchers, small business owners, and teachers in Oklahoma paying the debts of Ivy League lawyers and doctors across the U.S.” Mullin had more than $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Kevin Hern (R-OK) said: “To recap, in the last two weeks, the ‘Party of the People’ has supercharged the IRS to go after working-class Americans, raised their taxes, and forced them to pay for other people's college degrees.” Hern had more than $1 million in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Mike Kelly (R-PA) said: “Asking plumbers and carpenters to pay off the loans of Wall Street advisors and lawyers isn’t just unfair. It’s also bad policy.” Kelly had $987,237 in PPP loans forgiven.

Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) said: Everyone knows that in a $60 Billion+ European land war, it's always the last $3 Billion that kicks in the door….” Gaetz had $482,321 in PPP loans forgiven.

Then Biden gave a barn-burning speech to the Democratic National Committee in Rockville, Maryland, clearly dividing the Republican Party between the MAGAs and mainstream Republicans. The MAGA philosophy is “semi-fascism,” he said, and we are seeing either its beginning or death knell.

“I want to be crystal clear about what’s on the ballot this year. Your right to choose is on the ballot this year. The Social Security you paid for from the time you had a job is on the ballot. The safety of our kids from gun violence is on the ballot…. The very survival of our planet is on the ballot. Your right to vote is on the ballot. Even…democracy.”

“The MAGA Republicans don’t just threaten our personal rights and economic security,” he said. “They’re a threat to our very democracy. They refuse to accept the will of the people. They embrace…political violence. They don’t believe in democracy.”

“This is why in this moment, those of you who love this country—Democrats, Independents, mainstream Republicans—we must be stronger,” he said.

My father and Senator Joe McCarthy The Roots of Trumpism (Part 5)

 

WORTH READING!

This is how extreme Republicans have become.

JOSEPH MCCARTHY?

When Robert Draper of the New York Times recently asked Rose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., to name the first Republican leader she ever admired, she immediately mentioned former Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy.

Lots of names mentioned: JOE MCCARTHY, ROGER STONE, ROSE SPERRY, ROY COHN, J. EDGAR HOOVER, RICHARD NIXON

FROM ROBERT REICH:

My father and Senator Joe McCarthy

The Roots of Trumpism (Part 5)

Robert Reich

Aug 26

When Robert Draper of the New York Times recently asked Rose Sperry, a state committeewoman for Arizona’s G.O.P., to name the first Republican leader she ever admired, she immediately mentioned former Wisconsin senator Joe McCarthy. “I grew up during the time that Joe McCarthy was doing his talking,” Sperry said. “I was young, but I was listening. If he were here today, I would say, ‘Get him in there as president!’”

I also grew up during the time Joe McCarthy was “doing his talking,” and I was young and listening, too. But I would not want Joe McCarthy to be president. Neither, let me add, did my father.

Ed Reich called himself a liberal Republican, in the days when such creatures still existed. He voted for Thomas Dewey in 1948 (cancelling my mother’s vote for Harry Truman), and then for Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 (cancelling my mother’s votes for Adlai Stevenson), and he thought highly of New York State’s Republican governor, Nelson Rockefeller, and its Republican senator, Jacob Javits — neither of whom would last a second in today’s G.O.P.

But Ed Reich could not abide bullies and he detested Joe McCarthy. My father thought that anyone who had to bully someone else to feel good about himself was despicable. Bullying led to antisemitism and antisemitism had led to the holocaust. In 1947, Ed Reich moved us from Scranton to a little village in the country some sixty miles north of New York City, called South Salem, so as to be within equal driving distance of his two women’s clothing stores, in Norwalk, Connecticut, and Peekskill, New York. Soon after we arrived, a delegation of older men from the village came by to inform us that South Salem was a “Christian community” and we were not welcome there. That was the day my father decided we’d stay put in South Salem. “I’ll show those bastards,” he said.

Senator Joseph McCarthy had a special place in Ed Reich’s pantheon of evil bullies. McCarthy didn’t just attack those he claimed were members of the Communist Party. He did it with malice. McCarthy’s crusade against “subversives” extended into the mainstream of America and American politics, as he ridiculed the “pitiful squealing” of “those egg-sucking phony liberals” who “would hold sacrosanct those Communists and queers.”

Every time McCarthy’s image came across the six-inch screen on the Magnavox television in our living room, my father would shout “son of a BITCH” so loudly it made me shudder.

In Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, historian Ellen Wolf Schrecker describes a movement that “punished thousands of law-abiding Americans and scared millions more into silence, destroying much of the left and seriously narrowing the political spectrum.”

McCarthyism was the byproduct of the Republican Party’s postwar effort to eradicate the New Deal by linking it to communism. The G.O.P. portrayed the midterm election of 1946 as a “battle between Republicanism and communism.” The Republican National Committee chairman claimed that the federal bureaucracy was filled with “pink puppets.”

According to John Nichols, in The Fight for the Soul of the Democratic Party, Southern segregationist Democrats joined the red-baiting rhetoric. Mississippi senator Theodore Bilbo, a Klansman who had filibustered to block anti-lynching legislation, described multiracial labor unions’ advocacy for civil rights as the work of “northern communists.” Representative John Elliott Rankin, a fiercely racist and antisemitic Mississippi Democrat who helped establish the House Un-American Activities Committee as a standing congressional committee, called the CIO’s Southern organizing campaign “a communist plot” and charged that it would lead to more Black voting rights. “We’re asleep at the switch,” he warned. “They’re taking over this country; we’ve got to stop them if we want this country.”

The backlash was successful. In the 1946 midterms, Democrats lost control of both the Senate and the House. Wisconsin ended its era of progressive Republican La Follettes and sent Joe McCarthy to the Senate. California replaced New Dealer Jerry Voorhis with a young Republican lawyer who had already figured out how to use red-baiting as a political tool. His name was Richard Nixon.

In December 1946, at the founding convention of the Progressive Citizens of America, FDR’s former vice president, Henry Wallace, saw the red scare for what it was — a tool of the most powerful economic forces in America. “We shall … repel all the attacks of the plutocrats and monopolists who will brand us as Reds,” he said.

If it is traitorous to believe in peace — we are traitors. If it is communistic to believe in prosperity for all — we are communists. If it is unAmerican to believe in freedom from monopolistic dictation — we are unAmerican. We are more American than the neo-Fascists who attack us. The more we are attacked the more likely we are to succeed, provided we are ready and willing to counterattack.

But there was no counterattack. The red scare continued to gain ground, encouraged by J. Edgar Hoover, the first director of the F.B.I.

Soon after the release of Frank Capra’s loving ode to America, “It’s a Wonderful Life” in January 1947, the F.B.I. (using a report by an ad-hoc group that included Fountainhead writer and future Trump pin-up girl Ayn Rand) warned that the movie represented “rather obvious attempts to discredit bankers by casting Lionel Barrymore as a ‘scrooge-type’ so that he would be the most hated man in the picture.” The movie “deliberately maligned the upper class, attempting to show the people who had money were mean and despicable characters. This … is a common trick used by Communists.” The F.B.I. report compared “It’s a Wonderful Life” to a Soviet film, and alleged that Frank Capra was “associated with left-wing groups” and that screenwriters Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett were “very close to known Communists.”

President Truman succumbed to the mounting anti-communist hysteria. On March 21, 1947 he signed Executive Order 9835, the Loyalty Order that ushered in loyalty oaths and background checks, and created the Attorney General’s List of Subversive Organizations.

Yet the progressive left remained silent. As the 1950 election approached, a Times headline announced that the “Left is Silent in Campaign.” Even the American Civil Liberties Union, whose roots lay in the first Red Scare of the World War I era, was reluctant to take the lead in opposing the threat to civil liberties in the second Red Scare of the 1950s.

California Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas, dubbed the “Pink Lady” for her supposed communist sympathies, tried for the Senate in 1950. She survived a bitter primary battle only to be beaten in November by red-bater Richard Nixon.

On June 9, 1954, I sat at my father’s side on our living room couch, watching the Army-McCarthy hearings. McCarthy had accused the U.S. Army of having poor security at a top-secret facility.

Joseph Welch, a private attorney, was representing the Army. McCarthy charged that one of Welch’s young staff attorneys was a communist.

“Son of a BITCH,” my father shouted.

As McCarthy continued his attack on Welch’s staff attorney, Welch broke in, “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness.”

I was spellbound. McCarthy didn’t stop. “Son of a BITCH,” Ed Reich shouted ten times more loudly. The earth shook.

At this point, Welch demanded that McCarthy listen to him. “Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator,” he said. “You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency?”

Almost overnight, as the Senate Historical Office recounts, “McCarthy’s immense national popularity evaporated. Censured by his Senate colleagues, ostracized by his party and ignored by the press, McCarthy died three years later, 48 years old and a broken man.”

***

During the Army-McCarthy hearings, McCarthy’s chief counsel was Roy Cohn. Cohn had gained prominence as the Department of Justice attorney who successfully prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, leading to their execution in 1953. The Rosenberg trial had brought the 24-year-old Cohn to the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who convinced McCarthy to hire Cohn as chief counsel for McCarthy’s Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, where Cohn became known for his aggressive questioning of suspected communists.

My father thought Roy Cohn almost as despicable as Joe McCarthy.

After McCarthy’s downfall, Cohn proved useful to a young New York real estate developer named Donald Trump who was then undertaking several large construction projects in Manhattan and needed a fixer and mentor. Cohn filled both roles. Fred Trump had got his son’s career started by bringing him into the family business of middle-class rentals in Brooklyn and Queens. Cohn established Donald in Manhattan, introducing him to New York’s social and political elite, and defending him against a growing list of enemies.

In 1973, the Justice Department accused Trump of violating the Fair Housing Act of 1968 in thirty-nine of his properties, alleging that Trump quoted different rental terms and conditions to prospective tenants based on their race, and made false “no vacancy” statements to Black people seeking to rent. Representing Trump, Roy Cohn filed a countersuit against the government for $100 million, asserting that the charges were “irresponsible and baseless.” Although the countersuit was unsuccessful, Trump settled the charges out of court in 1975, asserting he was satisfied that the agreement did not “compel the Trump organization to accept persons on welfare as tenants unless as qualified as any other tenant.” Three years later, when the Trump Organization was again in court, this time for violating terms of the 1975 settlement, Cohn called the charges “nothing more than a rehash of complaints by a couple of planted malcontents.” Trump denied the charges.

Cohn was also involved in the construction of Trump Tower, helping secure concrete during a city-wide Teamster strike through a union leader linked to a mob boss. At about this time, Cohn introduced Trump to another of Cohn’s clients, Rupert Murdoch.

During Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign, Cohn helped a young Roger Stone arrange for John Anderson to be nominated by New York’s Liberal Party, thereby splitting the state’s opposition to Reagan and allowing Reagan to carry the state with 46 percent of the vote. Stone later recounted that Cohn gave him a suitcase to be dropped off at the office of a lawyer influential in Liberal Party circles. Speaking after the statute of limitations for bribery had expired, Stone said, “I paid his law firm. Legal fees. I don't know what he did for the money, but whatever it was, the Liberal Party reached its right conclusion out of a matter of principle.”

In 1986, Cohn was disbarred by the New York State Bar for unethical conduct after attempting to defraud a dying client by forcing the client to sign a will amendment leaving Cohn his fortune. (Cohn died five weeks later from AIDS-related complications.)

In his first and best-known book, “The Art of the Deal,” Trump distinguished between integrity and loyalty — and made clear he preferred loyalty. Trump compared Roy Cohn to “all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty ... What I liked most about Roy Cohn was that he would do just the opposite.”