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| WWRCSAD: What would Roy Cohn say and do. |
That image [as cropped] is from Time, April 2017, this link.
The above headline quote is from another item, an AP feed, "Trump Organization finance chief gets immunity," published online today. About Weisselberg and immunity.
The quote and the opening image, while not congruent in time or context, show that this accountant/bookkeeper for Trump's businesses dates back to the early days of Trump impudence, when Trump was close and likely mentored in ways and means by Roy Cohn, however that may have influenced the man being who he is today [who Trump is, Cohn being dead, today].
Today's story, as linked above, is a short read left to readers to pursue.
The earlier year-ago Time report stated:
Pulitzer Prize winning historian Richard Hofstadter noted that the paranoid style has been around long before the alt-right discovered it — its targets in American political history have included immigrants, Catholics, international bankers, Masons, Jesuits, abortionists, the press, munitions makers, and most anyone else worthy of scapegoating. The term is intentionally pejorative as paranoia has “a greater affinity,” Hofstadter argued, “for bad causes than for good.”
Immigration has long been a salient feature of paranoid politics. Hofstadter wrote about Lyman Beecher, father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote in his 1835 Plea for the West that “A great tide of immigration, hostile to free institutions, was sweeping in upon the country, subsidized and sent by ‘the potentates of Europe,’ multiplying tumult and violence, filling jails, crowding poorhouses, quadrupling taxation, and sending increasing thousands of voters to ‘lay their inexperienced hand upon the helm of our power.’”
In modern times, besides Trump, leading exponents of the paranoid model have been Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon. All these men did political battle in a paranoid style. And connecting the dots between these complicated men was a corrupt lawyer named Roy Marcus Cohn, who never held elective office, but was close to all of them.
The grand jury brought three separate indictments against Cohn in the Southern District of New York for crimes ranging from conspiracy to mail fraud, bribery to securities fraud and extortion to obstruction of justice. Cohn launched a vicious counter attack against the motives of his accusers; Prosecutor Robert M. Morgenthau, he claimed, was engaging in payback because McCarthy alleged Morgenthau’s father, as FDR’s Treasury Secretary, had helped the Soviets manipulate the currency in Berlin. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, he said, held a grudge against him from McCarthy days because Cohn edged Kennedy out to become McCarthy’s chief counsel. [...]
None of these men had hard and fast policy objectives. When Trump breached the barriers of political correctness and the Constitution to preach criminalizing abortion, mass deportation of immigrants, or barring Muslims from the country, these views were hardly born of a sincerely nurtured ideology. Fear-mongering techniques such as anti-intellectualism, communist witch hunts, racism, sexism and the suggestion of anti-Semitism, xenophobic building of walls to keep out foreigners and refugees are all paranoid ideation that go down well in the populist “alt-right” culture.
Cohn parlayed his reputation as the prosecutor in the Rosenberg atomic spy case, into appointment as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy. In January, 1950, McCarthy had soared to national prominence with his infamously bogus claim: “I have here in my hand a list of 205 names made known to the Secretary of State as Communists, but who are still on the payroll.” In fact, there were only 65. Of these, the Secretary ordered further security tests. All passed.
As McCarthy’s consigliere, Cohn mastered the art of the smear, the lie, and the counterattack. Cohn, a willing handmaiden, sat at McCarthy’s side at the nationally televised Senate hearings.
That is the start of the Time item, with links omitted. You can guess where the Time item goes from there. And it does. Follow the link and read the entire item, links and all.
___________UPDATE__________
A Crabgrass post from two years ago. Also, see Politico, from May 2016.
____________FURTHER UPDATE___________
CNN, and here; cumulative.