‘All About the Fight’: How Donald Trump Developed His Political Playbook

It was 1973, and Donald Trump and his father, Fred, were in trouble.

The U.S. Department of Justice had just sued them both and the family’s multi-million dollar business, alleging racial bias by the real estate organization.

The company had allegedly marked rental applications from people of color with a “C” and discriminated against them — and in the words of Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio, the government “had the Trump organization nailed.”

“There were multiple Trump employees that confessed that they had been instructed to divert Black applicants for apartments, to discourage them, to tell them that apartments that had been rented when they hadn’t been,” D’Antonio says in the above excerpt from The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump, which premiered on Sept. 24, 2024, and is now available to watch online.

The advice from the regular Trump lawyers on how to handle the crisis was clear: Settle the case and move on.

Donald Trump took a different path — one that would shape his approach to life, business and, ultimately, politics.

As the embedded excerpt from The Choice 2024 examines, Trump sought out Roy Cohn, the notorious attorney to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the “Red Scare” in the 1950s.

Cohn’s cousin, David Marcus, says in the clip, “When they met, Roy said to him, ‘You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter. Go after the Justice Department. Don’t ever admit guilt.’”

Trump was “totally taken” by Cohn’s advice to “‘fight it. You’ll kill them. Just deny everything and fight,’” adds Ken Auletta of The New Yorker.

With Cohn as his lawyer, Trump countersued the federal government for $100 million, and said, “I have never, nor has anyone in our organization ever, to the best of my knowledge, discriminated or shown bias in renting our apartments.”

According to Marcus, Cohn’s cousin, “Donald Trump was on the ropes. There was no doubt they had discriminated. There was no doubt there was wrongdoing. And yet, Roy Cohn showed him that you can turn around a situation just by ignoring the facts and going after your attacker.”

From a legal perspective, the countersuit failed, and the Trumps ultimately signed a consent decree with the government in 1975 that required them to make their properties more accessible to minorities. The agreement did not include an admission of guilt.

“Roy went on the offensive and said this is a victory; Trump was vindicated,” Marcus says. “He knew before anybody else did that the court of public opinion is often more important than a court of law.”

The Choice 2024 draws a through line from that moment to the present, showing how Cohn’s playbook for the race discrimination suit became an enduring guide for Trump in handling future crises: Deny everything, fight back, and go on the offensive to declare victory.

“If somebody attacks him, he attacks them back, he says, ten times as hard,” says Peter Baker of The New York Times. “He’s not about diplomacy. He’s not about negotiation. He is all about the fight.”

The Choice 2024 is the newest installment of FRONTLINE’s election-year series The Choice, which has brought viewers in-depth, interwoven biographies of the two major-party U.S. presidential candidates since 1988. This year’s edition investigates the lives and characters of Trump and Kamala Harris as they seek the presidency, drawing on interviews with those who know the candidates best — and revealing key moments that shaped how each would lead the United States.

For the full story, watch The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump:

The documentary premiered on Sept. 24, 2024. It is available to watch on FRONTLINE’s website,  FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, the PBS App and PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. In tandem with the premiere, FRONTLINE published more than 30 extended interviews conducted by filmmaker Michael Kirk and his team as part of the ongoing FRONTLINE Transparency Project, which makes our source material available to the public.

The Choice 2024: Harris vs. Trump is a FRONTLINE Production with Kirk Documentary Group, Ltd. The director is Michael Kirk. The producers are Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser, Vanessa Fica and Philip Bennett. The writers are Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser. The reporters are Vanessa Fica and Brooke Nelson Alexander. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.

This story has been updated.