Roy Cohn’s prized pupil demonstrated the full range of the master’s teachings in tonight’s so-called Presidential Debate. Stalking the stage with his glowering countenance, deliberately standing behind, talking and looming over and attempting to unsettle Hillary Clinton at every opportunity, Donald Trump summoned all the dark arts honed by Cohn during his decades as New York’s most despised and feared attorney.
What Cohn learned as Senator Joe McCarthy’s hit man in the 1950’s, and demonstrated again and again as Trump’s attorney and confidant in the early years of The Donald’s career, was to attack, attack and attack. Never apologize, freely smear opponents, threaten retaliation, intimidate and whenever possible deflect charges by blaming others for the very actions you yourself have committed.
If the issue at hand is Trump’s blatant and well-documented history of misogyny and sexual assault, attack Hillary for her husband’s indiscretions, and in the process create a false equivalency by smearing her for defending him. When faced with irrefutable evidence of his own words and deeds, even prompting a flood of Republican officeholders to flee his campaign, Trump’s response is not to apologize. Instead, in an act which likely would have brought a smile even to Cohn’s face, he holds a pre-debate press conference to designed to deflect attention onto several of Bill Clinton’s long-ago accusers—even to the extent of bringing them into the debate hall in an effort to shake Hillary’s confidence.
It was a no-holds-barred, virtuoso performance, even to the point of threatening earlier in the day to retaliate against Republican defectors, labeling them “self-righteous hypocrites,” for distancing themselves from his own gutter politics.
Hillary gamely held her ground against the assault, staying for the most part on the higher road. Her only lapse, I suggest, was in failing to channel Joseph Welch’s timeless response in 1954 to Senator McCarthy’s ceaselessly bullying and smearing of witnesses during the Army-McCarthy hearings. She might well have stated, “Until this moment, Mr. Trump, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness...Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?
“Have you, sir, no decency left?”