Dumping On Trump's Mentor Roy Cohn

If you knew what Roy Cohn did, you wouldn't judge my sordid fantasy of revenge.

Marilynn K. Yee—The New York Times/Redux

by Rich Herschlag

One night this past late October when things were looking pretty bleak for the Democrats in the midterms I reached some sort of silent yet dramatic boiling point. It wasn’t so much a matter of whether the Democrats were about to lose one house of Congress or both or by how much. Rather, it was the realization that at 60 this was going to be the rest of my life—hanging on to some shred of democracy through persistence, tenacity, inventiveness, and eternal vigilance. Failure seemed inevitable because a single gracious, legal transfer of power to the Trump party in any one of the next several national elections was both likely and likely to be permanent. Therefore, I along with anyone in the United States who thought as I did was living on borrowed time.

Worse still were the ground rules for that borrowed time. The Trump party was allowed to commit blatant violent insurrection, plot to kidnap elected officials, restrict access to the polls, threaten the lives of election officials, gerrymander till districts resembled discarded shoelaces, and gaslight like it was breathing. In return, our side was allowed incisive commentary, methodical voter registration, and sober litigation. Veering even slightly from this straight and narrow path even once would be ironclad evidence the contest for the fate of the United States was nothing more than a gang fight, with the result deservedly up for grabs and firmly in the realm of all’s fair in love and war.

As a member of the pro-democracy movement my job like everyone else’s was to accept with a smile as many blows to the head as the opposition chose to deliver while at the same time maintaining a Christ-like level of humanitarian concern for the condition of the opposition’s fists, brass knuckles, nightsticks, billy clubs, or flagpoles. Regarding this long, agonizing, and inevitable descent through purgatory into the fires of hell, I considered on the night of October 29, 2022 who perhaps more than anyone else—living or not—was responsible. The name I came up with was Roy Cohn.