Roy Cohn was an American Jewish Darth Vader

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(RNS) — Roy Cohn is an American auto accident.

You don’t want to look, but you can’t look away.

More than seven decades after he first made his name, Kai Bird and Susan Goldmark have written a new biography of the late lawyer and political activist, “ American Scoundrel: Roy Cohn’s Dark Journey from Joe McCarthy to Donald Trump .” It has pulled Cohn’s wreckage back into view, and I find myself, like everyone else, rubbernecking at this particular crash, unable to drive past it.

Here is why the wreckage still matters.

You cannot fully understand Donald Trump without understanding Cohn. This is articulated in “The Apprentice,” the 2024 film that features Jeremy Strong as Cohn, serving as the young Trump’s mentor and concierge to Manhattan through the 1970s and ’80s. Matt Tyrnauer’s 2019 documentary “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” – the same story.

Cohn taught Trump to be ruthless, to treat morality as an obstacle rather than a constraint, and above all to deny everything — always — regardless of the evidence in front of him. Whatever else you conclude about him, Cohn was the midwife of…