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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhere Trump Learned to Love Ritualized Flattery
By David Margolick
June 13, 2017
Donald Trump is not, by all accounts, a great reader. But he's memorized the Roy Cohn playbook, and in his first Cabinet meeting, on Monday, he consulted a page from it: the one on ritualized flattery.
Trump was a regular at Cohn's summer parties, held at his Greenwich, Connecticut, estate. I covered a couple of them, and they were amazing spectacles. They attracted a whole range of movers and shakers and fixers and scoundrels, along with assorted artists and moguls: Carmine DeSapio and Meade Esposito mixed and milled with Andy Warhol and Calvin Klein. But nothing about these gatherings was more fascinating than the peculiar ritual with which they concluded, in which speaker after speaker would get up and praise the host.
Most people are lucky to hear such unending encomiums once in a lifetime. More often, they don't hear them at all; only their children, and other assorted mourners, do. But for Cohn, it was an annual event. He would gaze out over his guests, the grizzled political bosses, lawyers, judges, businessmen, journalists, boyfriends, and other recipients of his largesse, and call on them to speak. Whether it was prearranged or spontaneous I didn't know, but no one he selected was ever at a loss for words. Instead, each stood up, raised high his plastic cupadorned with the same menacing caricature of Cohn that he used on his stationery, along with the letters R.M.C.and sang Cohn's praises, as Cohn, a look of bemused contentment on his face, listened raptly. The routinein a garden festooned with flags and red, white, and blue flowers and balloonswas so astonishing to me that, having simply watched it one year, I vowed to return the next to see if it happened again, and to record it for posterity. Sure enough, it did, and with the same cast of characters. And I wrote it up for the New York Times, in the summer of 1983. My story preserved only a few flattering fragments. I'm sure there were many, many more.
The Mike Pence of the occasion, i.e. the keynoter setting the sycophantic tone, was the former Mayor of New York Abe Beame. "A fighter and a doer," he called Cohn. Then came State Senator Roy Goodman, who described Cohn as "a very good, very close friend." But these guys were but the warm-ups. Richard Viguerie, the direct-mail guru and publisher of Conservative Digest, described Cohn as "twenty-four karat, one of life's great Americans." Yet more astonishingand not only because he was a sitting federal judge in Manhattanwas David Edelstein. As he put it, distilling the essence of Roy Cohn was like "attempting to separate the facets that make a diamond sparkle." And topping even him was the New York lawyer Paul Windels, Jr. "If there's one person who should be on the Court of Appeals or the Supreme Court of the United States, that person would be Roy Cohn," he declared.
I remember looking to see if anyone suppressed a laugh as Windels said that, and no one did: it was even more unctuous than anything Reince Priebus might have managed. But, while the sentiments that night on Cohns estate were as slobbering as those around Donald Trump's table yesterday, they weren't as meretricious. The tone was entirely affectionate; no one appeared fearful, let alone to be hanging on by his fingernails. Cohn, unlike Trump, had lots of friends, on both sides of the aisle, and they clearly liked him. They detected in him a trait that's rarely, if ever, been ascribed to Trump, a man who once saw fit to tell Chris Christie, in public, to lay off the Oreos: loyalty. One of them, Congressman John LeBoutillier, from Long Island, talked about it that night in his_ _toast: "Loyalty," he said, "is Roy Cohn's middle name." Cohn, like Trump, clearly craved all the praise, but no one offering it seemed coerced or humiliated. While Trump seems to exalt in grovelling, Cohn just needed to be loved. And Cohn guests only had to perform for a finite number of summers; think of how many more meetings Trump's Cabinet officers must endure.
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http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/where-trump-learned-to-love-ritualized-flattery
tanyev
(42,358 posts)chin pointing upward, a beatific smile on his face, just preening and basking in the flattery. Bizarre.
Cha
(295,903 posts)Laura PourMeADrink
(42,770 posts)If you constantly praise someone over and over - most people cool it when they never get positive feedback in return. Trump ridicules and embarrasses them and puts them in jeopardy. Perhaps all his people are "those who love too much" - just have a need to try harder and harder for his affection. Read once it stems back to your father - not giving you enough affection.
dixiegrrrrl
(60,010 posts)The info about Cohn in the OP said that people felt HE was loyal to them.
It is of course well known that Trump demands, as we have seen, loyalty, but not that he gives it.
and that is one reason he has to have force people into repeated compliments, it does not fill him up because it is not honest, and he knows it.
FWIW....Roger Stone, who worshiped Cohn and Nixon, has been a Trump sycophant for decades, but Trump has denied he knows Roger, several times.
Loyalty....
UTUSN
(70,496 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)I would be mortified if people were taking turns laying on such unctuous praise like that - whether it was true or not. It's just not my style, I guess. I would be embarrassed if I was at an event where the host not only welcomed it, but basked in it. I find such narcissism revolting.