Kai Bird has spent his career as a biographer of men whose private lives explain public catastrophes. American Scoundrel, co-authored with Susan Goldmark, applies that same method to Roy Cohn — Columbia Law graduate at 20, Rosenberg prosecutor, McCarthy's operational brain, and from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, Donald Trump's mentor, lawyer, and fixer. The argument is structural: every brutal tactic associated with Trump in business and politics has a Cohn prototype. The book's most revealing moments come from Bird's four phone calls to Trump on his personal number. Trump answered. In one exchange, Trump spontaneously rewrote the history of his first meeting with Cohn — placing himself as the recognized party, not the seeker — a small but crystalline demonstration of exactly the Cohn lesson Bird is tracing: reality is whatever story you tell most convincingly. Bird's annotation is terse and perfect: 'Another lesson from Cohn: tell the story however the hell you want.' Bird's portrait of Cohn versus McCarthy is the book's most counterintuitive analytical move. McCarthy, Bird argues, was the simpler figure — a populist senator looking for headlines who stumbled onto anticommunism. Cohn was the ideologue, the actual engine: the one who ran the hearings, conducted the interrogations, and was driven by a specific psychological need to prove, as a Jewish American, that not all Jews were leftwing. The Red Scare had an architect, and it wasn't the senator whose name it carries. The closet is where the book gets genuinely uncomfortable, and Bird doesn't flinch. Cohn was gay, attracted to Trump when they met in 1973, surrounded by 'boy toys' (teen hustlers), and also the man whose attempts to protect G. David Schine from overseas service — with insinuations of a sexual relationship between them — triggered the Army-McCarthy hearings that destroyed McCarthy. The chapter titled 'Predator' includes the documented case of Richard Kerr, a Northern Irish boy trafficked into abuse who ended up with Cohn. The contradiction Bird holds together — a man capable of genuine charm, even tenderness, who also committed serious harm — is what makes this biography rather than prosecution. Cohn died in August 1986, aged 59, from AIDS, denied to the end. He was disbarred for unethical conduct shortly before his death, three prior indictments having failed. He still marshaled 36 character witnesses for the disbarment hearing, including Trump, William F. Buckley Jr., and Barbara Walters, who had served as his 'beard.' The received wisdom — that Trump abandoned Cohn in his final illness — is complicated by Bird's reporting. Switchboard operator Chris Seymour describes Trump keeping his distance as the AIDS diagnosis became undeniable, fewer calls, less legal reliance. But Trump also hosted Cohn at Mar-a-Lago for a farewell dinner in March 1986, five months before his death. A witness at the memorial service saw Trump weep. These are the details that make the book worth reading — the story is more human and therefore more disturbing than the morality play version. The book's cultural moment is unmistakable: Trump re-elected, Cohn suddenly current again, Fox News and Joe Rogan declining to cover a serious biography of the president's acknowledged mentor. Bird called Rogan's publicist; Rogan looked at the galleys and passed. The silence is itself a data point. Bird — who won a Pulitzer for American Prometheus, the Oppenheimer biography that became the Nolan film — is not writing polemically. He is writing historically, which turns out to be more damaging.
