From Todd Larson
Blanchardville
To the Editor:
I am a tried and true Son of Wisconsin, immensely proud of larger than life and positively impactful Daughters and Sons of Wisconsin who came before. Such as famed conservationist Gaylord Nelson.
I am also painfully aware of prominently nefarious son of Wisconsin Joe McCarthy. For those who need a reminder, McCarthy — “America’s Most Hated Senator” — ruined careers and lives through baseless persecution of fellow Americans under his Red Scare of the 1950s. You may have heard of the definitive ‘have you no sense of decency?’ query by U.S. Army attorney Joseph Welch.
McCarthy also fomented a Lavender Scare — persecution of purported gays serving in the State Department. Particularly irksome to me, as an openly gay international civil servant and senior presidential appointee in the Obama Administration. And particularly ironic, since McCarthy’s closest advisor, Roy Cohn, was himself a torturously closeted gay.
Cohn went on to serve as mentor and lawyer to the Trump business in NYC, using deeply unscrupulous methods to ensure Trump’s emerging real estate empire avoid prosecution for e.g. discriminatory housing practices. Throughout Cohn’s career, his defining mantra was ‘deny, deny, deny; attack, attack, attack; claim victory, whatever the outcome’. Sum — the end always justifies the means.
Sound familiar? Trump was indeed a dutiful student of Cohn over those years. A bromance too distasteful to analyze in psycho-sexual detail. But a few facts do jump out.
Cohn referred to Donald Trump as his best friend. Cohn told journalists that Trump phoned him 15 to 20 times a day. According to Christine Seymour, Cohn’s long-time switchboard operator, Trump was the last person to speak to Cohn on the phone before he died ignominiously in 1986.
Trump reportedly asked ‘where’s my Roy Cohn?’ in frustration when Attorney General Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2018 (perhaps Stephen Miller is Roy Cohn reincarnated).
As Donald Trump’s remaining mental faculties fade away, it is clear that Joe McCarthy, via Roy Cohn, continues to live on rent free in the increasingly spacious real estate of Trump’s head.
