The FRONTLINE Interviews
Marie Brenner
Vanity Fair
Marie Brenner is an author, investigative journalist, and writer-at-large for Vanity Fair. In 1991, Donald Trump poured a glass of wine down her back during a dinner gala, after she’d written an unflattering piece about him and his then-wife Ivana.
This is the transcript of an interview with FRONTLINE’s Michael Kirk conducted on June 14, 2018. It has been edited for clarity and length.
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The way that you defined the major piece about Roy Cohn is the fact that, as you write, he in a lot of ways is Trump’s alter ego.I’d like to get an understanding of what do you mean by that.
OK, yeah.For many, Trump was created by the politics of intimidation and the legal structure taught to him by his mentor Roy Cohn, who really was his alter ego.
And in what ways?
From the time Trump was a child, he was a person who was all id.He acted on impulse.He didn’t understand rules.He was the boy who threw the cake at the birthday party.He was the boy who threw the erasers at the teacher.There are so few people who could confirm that kind of reality for Donald Trump as he grew up.But when he met Roy Cohn at Le Club in the 1970s, he found exactly the yin-yang combination that could give him a legal strategy for the rest of his career.
He’s 27 at that point, Trump.
He was 27.
Describe him: what was he like, what he got from Cohn, and the personality of Donald Trump at that point, and what he was trying to do.
At 27, he was all ambition.There was an attractiveness about him.One reporter from The New York Times thought he looked like a young Robert Redford.She gushed all over him in a piece that she wrote in the 1970s, about kids who were trying to be celebrities in New York.He was riding on a crest of trying to create himself in the way that he thought that people wanted young, rich people to behave.He had a limousine that he rode around town with his initials on it, and he tinted it.It was maroon.He had this kind of maroon-colored car that he would take around New York.
He liked to hang out with other people that he thought could bring him riches and power.So when he got to Le Club, he was actually in a kind of a desperate state.He would tell people that he was worth $200 million, but later it was reported that, in fact, he was just living off a kind of small trust income.… So he had already started in place with the exaggerator’s personality.
The moment that he meets Roy Cohn, however, there was drama in his life.The family and the Trump Organization and his father, Fred Trump, had been accused of racism in their housing practices.This was a particularly egregious case, because the Trump Organization had allegedly put large C’s to connote people of color who were applying for apartments , and the Justice Department had swung their lens onto what this group was doing in Brooklyn after some complaints had come in from some of the tenants.
And?
Cut to: Donald Trump sees the notorious Roy Cohn at a table at Le Club, and at this time, Le Club was a place where models hung out, and it was sort of a guys-and-dolls atmosphere.It was New York at its most inside, lush, for people trying for connection with each other.As legend has it, he approached Roy Cohn’s table, stuck out his hand and introduced himself, and said: “My father is being sued by the Justice Department over this race discrimination.What should we do?"And Cohn said, “Sue them; intimidate them; never back down."And this story has changed and morphed over the years.Who knows if it would even happen this way?
But the hilarious part was that, within a few days, they called a press conference and announced that the Trump Organization was suing the Justice Department for damages and defamation.And of course, this was Roy Cohn at his absolute most flagrant best, because anyone who’s had three days of law school knows that you cannot sue the Justice Department.
It’s all about Roy Cohn’s philosophy toward the law, that to hell with the law, basically; it’s all about the judge.And he teaches Donald a lot more than that.The relationship continues for a long time.He’s all about attack, attack, attack.He’s all about “Be the plaintiff, always the plaintiff.Never admit guilt."Talk a little bit about—
Roy Cohn was, in fact, far more nuanced than one would understand just from what's been written on the top of the stories.Let’s start with the fact that he was at Columbia Law School and graduated from Columbia by the time he was 20.That already is extraordinary.There's no question that he was brilliant.He could stand up in a court and give a closing argument, as he once did, firing down charges from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, doing a six-hour close on his own behalf without a note.
So start from there.He was a sloppy lawyer in the sense that he never prepared for cases until the very end, and did have a belief that, “Just show me the judge, and I can get a result."But he had a facility of words and a facility of presentation, which caused him to have tremendous success as a litigator.So in many cases, with Cohn, people who worked with him have said that, in fact, he didn’t always just say, “Attack, attack, attack."Often he would try to negotiate; he would try to navigate.He would try to find a way in so he wouldn’t have to get to that final crisis point.
What was Trump looking for?A lot of this film is about the fact of he’s always been looking for his next Roy Cohn.What's he looking for?Why does he gravitate toward Roy Cohn?What does he see about this guy?And he, Trump, would always say he’s looking for the “killers."What was that relationship all about?
Roy Cohn came into Trump’s life at a very pivotal moment.He was a young man in his 20s, trying to make a stake in Manhattan.He was trying to navigate complicated tax abatements and real estate laws and problems in getting a hotel that was kind of decrepit, the Commodore, in a decrepit part of 42nd Street, turned into a gleaming Hyatt Hotel.And he was in partnership with the Pritzker family, who owned the Hyatt.
Now, to do this in the New York of that period, where they were just trying to get tax abatements to get the city out of financial problems, there were all kinds of leases that you had to negotiate and navigate through the courts in a very byzantine New York City real estate structure.You needed someone who really understood the territory, who could go in the backdoor of judges.
Trump, however, was an intrepid worker who would get up at dawn and be the first person into some of these offices.… He would throw out outrageous demands.He would refuse to navigate, for example, on any kind of concession, for city stair-safety regulations.At one point, the mayor of the city at that point, Ed Koch, was just ready to pull his hair out, because Trump wouldn’t even agree to some stairwell safety regulation.Anything that he could argue about, he did, and Cohn was his backup attack dog that would help; he would never give in to anything.
If it were a case of, for example, when he is breaking ground on the Trump Tower, if it was a case where there were, in this case, very, very valuable Art Deco sculptures that were on the side of a department store, that they needed to demolish, Trump agreed that he would save them.They were going to the Metropolitan.And it required a half a day of just very careful demolition around them.
Instead, he had a group of Polish immigrant workers that a contractor had brought in, who were being underpaid and overworked, something like 18-hour days, seven days a week, and the Polish workers, as the sort of architectural establishment of New York looked on in horror, simply blew up these very, very valuable Art Deco sculptures that were going to go to the Met.
… Trump never sees a rule or a promise that he can't break.
Cohn’s pivotal point, really from the decade on, after the discrimination case.
Roy Cohn was Trump’s lawyer, but his role in his life was much larger.He was his confidante.He was an ersatz father.He was the person who Trump went to with any kind of a problem, with a tax abatement issue, a marriage-divorce prenuptial agreement issue.But more than that, they were friends.At one point, Roy, who had a crush on Donald Trump as a young man, turned to someone and said, “Donald is my best friend." …
Talk a little bit about also Fred, the dad, as well as Roy, their political connections and how important that was to Donald and the Brooklyn-Queens connection.How was all that important in Donald’s career?
Donald Trump was a product of a family who had gotten so much of their real estate and so much of their ability to build their buildings from the generosity of the Democratic machine of New York.This was a time that New York was still controlled by the boroughs and the party appointments, and Fred Trump was a generous donor to all the candidates who were trying to be the county borough presidents, the leaders.He was given special concessions for leases, for tax abatements of all kind, to build his buildings.And they were fixtures at the various club dinners and the political events that would happen in Brooklyn and in Queens.But Brooklyn was really their bailiwick.
Roy Cohn as well had come up in that power structure, because his father was an appellate judge in the Bronx, and he was the beneficiary, as well as the conferer of favors of his father.So it is possible that their paths had crossed even before they had at Le Club.And in fact, there have been reports that suggested they may have met earlier, when Donald was really quite young, when he would go around with his father.
… Imagine New York in the 1950s, in these smoke-filled rooms.There was a language that would go on.People would say: “Fred, can you make this go away?Can you make this go away?"This is a language that might be said to someone who was either a developer or someone who was a politician.It’s the same language that you hear Donald Trump using, as he did with James Comey: “Can you make this go away?"It’s kind of a signal that he is still imprinted somehow with that language that he heard in his childhood that was around the Brooklyn and the Bronx court system.
The discrimination case: Let’s sum that up.What happens with the discrimination case?In some ways, it’s not a victory, but it’s painted as a victory.How did the discrimination case wind up?
The discrimination case wound up where the Trumps agreed to a large settlement that stayed sealed.And they played it as a win, because they played it as a win.
Was it a win?
No, it wasn’t a win.They had to pay a large settlement.
So why play it as a win?
Because that was the strategy.The strategy was, you always play it as a win.When Roy Cohn, for example, was driven out of the Senate at the end of the McCarthy period, and it was clear that everything he had done was simply a catastrophe, and trying to wreck the reputations of so many people, he came back to New York in triumph.And his father, the judge, organized a large dinner for 2,000 people at a hotel in New York, to honor Sen. [Joe] McCarthy, and they raised a lot of money.And Roy got a standing ovation, as did Sen. McCarthy.Again, that is the New York moral amnesia, play-it-as-a-win strategy.
Also, you quote somebody in the article [gossip columnist Liz Smith] saying that Donald “lost his moral compass” when he met Roy Cohn .What do you mean by that?
...Trump lost his moral compass when he threw in with Roy Cohn.Roy Cohn was known by anyone who understood anything about American history as being one of the architects of the most sinister period in American history, and that was what he did in the Senate committee with Sen. McCarthy as they smeared people as communists.They made up charges.They ruined lives.In some cases, drove people to suicide.Many people lost their jobs.Cohn never felt guilty for any of it, for a moment.It was sheer political and career expediency.
This was a well-known fact in New York in the 1960s, when Cohn returned in the ’50s.People simply compartmentalized.It was as if they were in France during World War II, and they were collaborators in a moral amnesia, not saying what is right and what is wrong.Roy Cohn was able to reconsolidate his power by simply moving forward, and again, playing it as a win, saying things like, “You did what you had to do,” saying that the communism was a virulent threat to that America.
But there was a larger structure in this city and in the country that of course knew this was just a lie, and this was sheer opportunism.Cohn could deliver for well-placed clients, whether they were network heads, the New York Yankees’ owner George Steinbrenner, mafia leaders of all kinds.He set up in a townhouse on 68th Street.He rode in his Rolls Royce around the city.And, like Donald Trump would be years later, he, too, was a rule breaker.He would drive on the sidewalks if need be.He often, you know, if there were traffic, he would just tell the driver, “Drive on the sidewalk,” and nothing could stop him.
He was also attracted to Roy because of the indictments.There were three indictments brought up.What does that say about what he was looking for in a lawyer?
If Trump were asked to explain his view of the law, it might be that he would say, the law is expedience.He had seen his father almost go to prison when he was in college because his father was accused in something called Mitchell-Lama housing regulations of being absolutely in violation of the law.So Trump, as a teenager, suddenly faced down the fact that his father, Fred Trump, could be indicted .I believe that the Trumps feel that whatever works for them, they have to rely on themselves, that they are their own constitutional system, and that the laws do not apply.
… Let’s talk about his relationship with the press.In 1980, you were writing this big piece on Trump.What’s his reputation at that point?How does he gather attention?How [does he feel[ about the press?
Trump, in his early 30s, had a kind of adorable-monster quality.He was funny.He didn’t take himself that seriously.There was a kind of a lightness to his antics, even though he was fierce about his ambitions.He could make you laugh because he was so preposterous, and it was almost as if he knew he was sending up the kind of person that he thought he wanted to be.So there was a kind of hilarious, “stick your finger in the eyes of the authority” quality.And he loved being written about.He didn’t care, good, bad, indifferent.You would get a note.You would get something back.You would go into his office, he had every magazine cover where he had even been mentioned in a stack or framed on a wall.He was a glutton for press.
Have you gone into the whole thing about the false identity, the John Barron?
No, we’d like you to.That’d be great.
Was that the name, John Barron ?
Yes.
There are hilarious moments where reporters would get phone calls from someone named John Barron, telling them about the newest thing that Donald Trump had done, or answering a thorny legal question, or saying that Princess Diana was buying an apartment in the Trump Tower.And that would be John Barron calling.Of course within a few years, it was revealed that John Barron was, of course, Trump.There are tapes from reporters who have these John Barron tapes that are just so pure Trump.
At that point, everyone thought it was funny.It stopped being funny.
Why?
Because it became sinister.
How so?
Because he never told the truth.
Cohn was also good at it.When Cohn came to town, he became good friends with all the gossip columnists.Did he learn lessons from Cohn about this?
As Roy Cohn was making his way up as a young man in the 1950s, he was the darling of the gossip columnist Walter Winchell and Leonard Lyons, as a kid, at the Stork Club.He was 22.He had those heavy-lidded eyes.He always knew the gossip that was going on in his father’s courtroom.He knew celebrities, and he would drop tantalizing items.He became this sort of pampered pet of Walter Winchell, who helped him get the job at the McCarthy committee, and as well, the columnist Leonard Lyons.
Cut to decades later.Trump, as well, made his way up in the New York gossip columns.He was the darling of Page 6.He was the darling of a columnist named Claudia Cohen, who had a column at the New York Post then called “I, Claudia."He became the person who would give outrageous items about himself and about others, and then he would attack these same columnists for running these items.It became a kind of ongoing tennis game, where often certain columnists wouldn’t even want to take Trump’s calls, because they knew that anything he said was probably not going to be true.They would just say, “Thank you, Donald,” and hang up.
So how much of what Donald learned was from Cohn on that, on the use of the pampering of and the use of and the importance of the press?
I don’t think it was a question of student and master.I think that they were alter egos and that they both understood that you get your name in the paper however you get your name [in the paper].
And if you can, just talk about how he was perceived at that point.When that was all going on, was his star rising?Everybody knew about him?How famous was he becoming due to this kind of publicity?
New York was a split-screen reality.The establishment of New York thought of Trump as—if they thought of him at all—as a joke, as a vulgarian, as someone who was silly, who was just a vulgar builder, who was putting up these buildings.Trump had an intuitive understanding that it didn’t matter; that as long as his footprint was getting larger in the city, that he could eventually overcome what any establishment would think, and that they were going to become fossilized, and he would rise.
And of course, the more famous his name, the more that he could sell his name.
There was a kind of a Trump-o-meter that happened about 1984; that it used to be, in the discreet world of old money New York, that you kept your name out of the papers, that if you were Tiffany’s, you had small t’s.Trump broke all of this.And as Reagan deregulates, and the Wall Street buccaneers come in, New York becomes the carnival of the 1980s that Trump becomes a carnival barker in; that the T’s are now enormous.The lies are getting bigger and bigger.The exaggerations are huge.And it’s all promotion. …
So all of this, understanding this kind of lawyer and how he depended upon them, he comes to Washington.Rude awakening?I mean, does he understand the way the law sort of works, the rule of law in Washington, what a government lawyer thinks about his relationship with the president?What are your thoughts, your overview on him coming to Washington, how all of what he learned translates?
Trump comes into Washington seemingly not understanding anything about how the courts work, what our Constitution is.And off the starting gate, he delivers the ban on immigration, the ban on Muslim immigration.That becomes an absolute chaos.Storm of the month.Suddenly the airports are overrun with citizen lawyers that had volunteered from all over the country to fight the ban, and the ban is thrown out in several courts.
And this has been the ongoing, ongoing chaos, every day.He has disrupted something in the court system, firing of James Comey, firing of Preet Bharara in New York at the Southern District, taking on any legal strategy he possibly can and smashing it within the agencies, simply no longer following the rules.… They're in the kitchen, just breaking the plates.
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