I recently saw the movie "The Apprentice" about the relationship between Donald Trump and his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious lawyer who was involved in many of the mid-20th century's most high-profile political events. I don't know that the film told me anything I didn't already know but it did remind me of just how vicious Cohn was and how much Trump loved that about him. He learned his lessons well. The thru line between Cohn's nefarious career and Trump's own ruthlessness is set to manifest in this second term. It's almost as if it's all coming full circle.
Cohn's first big splash in national politics took place when he was only 23 years old. He was one of the lead prosecutors in the trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. He was so well-liked by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover that he recommended Cohn to be the lead counsel for Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy's communist witch hunt. (McCarthy had launched his famous crusade in Wheeling, West Virginia in 1950, by waving around a piece of paper that he claimed held the names of 205 communists in the U.S. State Department and his Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was off to the races.)
Cohn soon became a household name and was known as the "subcommittee's real brain" according to Time Magazine. He and McCarthy instigated a massive investigation and purge of government employees whom they accused of being communists or outed as homosexuals. (The latter was especially cruel on Cohn's part since he was gay himself.) This was the second Red Scare, the first having occurred in the years after WWI, but the focus on expelling people from the government, including the military, on thin suspicions of disloyalty was a specialty of McCarthy and Cohn.
When the fever finally broke, ("at long last sir, have you no decency...") McCarthy was censured and died before he could complete his second term. Cohn, on the other hand, went on to hobnob with the rich and famous including just about every powerful politician in America. He mentored the young Donald Trump in the ways of the world of business and politics and Trump took to his cutthroat philosophy very naturally.
Facing his second term in office today, Donald Trump and his transition team have hit the ground running with a series of stunning Cabinet appointments that have knocked the political establishment for a loop. Trump is drunk with power having staged an epic comeback after leaving office as ignominiously as any president in history, being indicted for federal and state crimes as well as losing lawsuits charging him with fraud and defamation. He believes he is invincible.
According to various reports, while he's enjoying the fealty and attention of the richest man in the world who seemingly never leaves his side, he is making these decisions impulsively, totally relying on instinct which he believes are what got him to where he is today. No longer restrained by the need to get elected or fear for his freedom, he can do anything. And right now he appears to be obsessed with setting up the conditions for his revenge on the "Deep State" and the people he believes stabbed him in the back during his first term.
But there's a lot going on in Trumpworld aside from his high-profile appointments. And, interestingly enough, one of the most important projects harkens back to Cohn and McCarthy's government purge in the 1950s. It has been worked on for several years by outside groups preparing the ground for a Trump restoration. This time there's no national security pretense or a rationale that people are betraying the country. It's all about loyalty to Donald Trump and his MAGA movement. But then in Trump's mind, "l'etat c'est moi" so it adds up to the same thing.
CNN reported that just before the election the Department of Transportation received a pile of FOIA requests asking that emails and text messages pertaining to Elon Musk be turned over. Apparently, this was just the latest wave of such requests that have been received by all the various federal agencies sent by Trump-aligned groups over the last two years demanding to identify "perceived partisans." They have used a variety of methods to ferret out information, including searching for DEI programs or even just emails with the keywords "climate change" in them. CNN calls it a "massive fishing expedition."
One of the groups is the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, another is the America First Policy Institute, a group with close ties to Trump’s transition team. And there are more, all to root out anyone suspected of not being sufficiently loyal to Donald Trump. They are looking at whether employees have ever donated to Democrats, written anything critical on social media or claimed that they have done something suspicious such as "helped immigrants who arrived in the US seeking legal status." The Heritage Oversight Project has even attempted to find out if any employees might be trying to subvert this investigation by seeking evidence of plots to subvert the president-elect’s expected purging by asking for emails that include the words “Trump” and “reduction in force.”
Trump signed an executive order at the end of his first term called Schedule F which allowed him to order mass firings of employees he believed he could not trust to do his bidding. Joe Biden rescinded it but Trump plans to reinstate it upon taking office. However, since there are millions of federal employees who could conceivably be disloyal to the Dear Leader, it was extremely helpful for these outside groups to do the investigative work ahead of time.
Unions and other advocacy groups say they are determined to fight, hoping they can find some allies in Congress to step up and "hoping public shaming and outrage may protect them." I'm pretty sure that's no longer operative in American politics but I suppose it's worth a try. The courts will undoubtedly be asked to determine whether a mass purge of employees because of perceived partisanship is constitutional but in the meantime it's scaring the hell out of many of them fearing that they are about to lose their jobs if they happened to have said something Donald Trump and his minions thinks is disloyal.
Roy Cohn would be so proud of his boy today. His witch hunt had to be conducted in the name of saving the country from communism. This one is a purge for the sheer pleasure of punishing people Donald Trump doesn't like and a message to all who might think of opposing him in the future. It's pure depravity, just the way Cohn taught him.
