Stan’s Trump seems to struggle with understanding Cohn’s fanaticism on this point, but he takes all of Cohn’s other lessons much more eagerly to heart. As the film reminds viewers, it is Cohn who taught Trump the three life lessons that would define his public persona forever-after. In Cohn’s zero-sum definition of winning, you must: 1) attack, attack, attack; 2) deny, deny, deny any and all criticism; and 3) always claim victory, even in defeat.
The film also shows Cohn teaching Donald how to use extralegal methods of manipulation, including blackmail, countersuit intimidation, and outright lying about your enemies. Whether or not every single incident of legal peril in the movie happened, it’s true that Cohn groomed Trump as an heir of his political philosophy with the three above tenets Trump later attempted to claim total credit for in his ghostwritten memoir, The Art of the Deal.
And the most spooky thing about The Apprentice is how it couches these lessons into a larger narrative of American conservative malpractice. While viewers are only given a hint of Cohn’s bullying style and unethical bragging, we get a real flavor of a man who famously quipped about his own parties, “If you’re not indicted, you’re not invited.” Like Trump, Roy Cohn did not operate on an island. In fact, the reason he wound up working almost entirely in private life as a New York courtroom brawler is because around the same time he sent Ethel Rosenberg to the chair, he also got deeply in bed with one of the most disgraced American politicians of the last hundred years: Sen. Joseph McCarthy.
The most Red Baiting of the Republican Red Baiters, McCarthy’s politics of fear-mongering, scapegoating, and visceral disgust for public servants (or “the deep state”) sound eerily familiar again these days. McCarthy earned his black mark in history by becoming part of the noun “McCarthyism” (shorthand for conspiratorial witch hunts) beginning in 1950 when he gave a speech in West Virginia alleging there were 205 “card-carrying members” of the Communist Party in the U.S. State Department. He failed to substantiate the claims then or ever, but he claimed at the time he “had a list” that he’d later produce. He never did, and his secretary eventually admitted he “just made it up.”
Nonetheless, he personally authored a dark chapter in American life, and eventually with Cohn acting as McCarthy’s chief counsel during the Army-McCarthy hearings of 1954. Together they inspected potential communists in the government, academia, and the media. They never proved anyone was actually a communist, however they ruined hundreds if not thousands of lives and careers by creating just the taint of investigation.
This included McCarthy and Cohn attempting to purge the government of any closeted gay men, because they claimed the USSR was using government employees’ homosexuality to coerce them into acts of treason and espionage. This claim was never proven, but their engineered “Lavender Scare” led to humiliated and ruined men committing suicide.