A young Donald Trump and his mentor and role model Roy Cohn.

Donald Trump has brought to the fore all of the worst impulses in American politics, media, and culture. He’s a compulsive liar, bully, and fraud. Yet, he has ended up in the Oval Office and is spreading his toxic influence in all directions. Where did this come from?

Frank Rich has the backstory needed to decode this: The Original Donald Trump: New York Establishment will ignore unscrupulous acts to serve its interests — just look how it treated Roy Cohn, onetime lawyer to the president.

Rich starts with a revival of Angels in America, in which Cohn is a character who has taken on a new salience in the age of Trump.

...this time it was Roy Cohn who dominated: a closeted, homophobic, middle-aged gay man also battling AIDS but who, unlike the fictional Prior, was a real-life Über-villain of America’s 20th century. “The polestar of human evil,” as one character describes him. “The worst human being who ever lived … the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54.” What has changed is not Angels but America. Even if you hadn’t known that Cohn had been Trump’s mentor and hadn’t read the election-year journalistic retrospectives on their toxic common tactics (counterpunch viciously, deny everything, stiff your creditors, manipulate the tabloids), you’d see and hear the current president in Cohn’s ruthless bullying and profane braggadocio. That isn’t because Nathan Lane, a Cohn for the ages, is doing a Trump impersonation. The uncanny overlap between these two figures is all there in the writing. “Was it legal? Fuck legal,” Cohn rants at one point, about having privately lobbied the judge Irving Kaufman to send Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. “Am I a nice man? Fuck nice. They say terrible things about me in the Nation. Fuck the Nation. You want to be Nice, or you want to be Effective?” It turns out that in his rendering of Cohn a quarter-century ago, Kushner had identified an enduring strain of political evil that is as malignant in its way as the AIDS virus, just as dangerous to the nation, and just as difficult to eradicate.

What Rich gets into is how someone like Cohn could continue to wield power and influence despite being a perfectly horrible human being. It’s due to the fact that for many people of power in politics, it’s not about morality or integrity, it comes down to “What can I do for you and what can you do for me?”

New York City in the 70’s and 80’s was (and continues to be) a place where everything is transactional. It’s where Trump first began to make a name for himself — and Cohn was one of the people involved in that rise. Along with people cited as crooks, scoundrels and worse, you’ll also find those who are supposed to be their polar opposites, all mingling together in a sea of mutual back-scratching and favor-trading. Maybe swamp is a better word to describe it these days.

Trump’s boasts that he would drain the swamp are laughable. He’s a creature of the swamp; he’s been swimming in it for most of his life.

Rich’s article is long, but well worth the read. It will give you a very different perspective on Trump and those who would oppose him. Wondering why the Clintons have ties to Trump? Wondering where Chuck Schumer fits in this, or Eliot Spitzer or Andrew Cuomo? Why was Trump a darling of the media? So many things become clear in this article, it’s almost painful.

Read The Whole Thing.