IMHO Trump could easily have avoided the NY case outcomes, but refused to accept advice. Also IMHO, he was fortunate that the Garland DOJ were duds. Tactically, could have snapped off all the low hanging fruit, who would have sold out Trump.
Although the Georgia prosecution was handicapped by the conduct of the prosecutoir, the door has not closed on many of the perps. The initial prosecutor, Fani Willis, was disqualified by the Court of Appeals in December 2024, and the prosecution is being continued by Pete Skandalakis.Other state cases may be in the pipeline.
Ayn Rand had the same ending, The goddess of individuality, of capitalism, died alone in a subsidized apartment, living on social security and Medicare.
Unfortunately a personal hero of mine, Nicholai Tesla, also died alone and broke in a NY apartment, alas he was a kind soul and taken advantage of by the likes of J P Morgan.
Not every decent person has a village that helps them prevail. Tesla deserved so much better. Cohn deserved less than he had most of his life, but his end was perfect karma. Trump deserves to go down in public disgrace, and we may be seeing the start of that now. I most certainly hope so!!
"Not every person has a village that helps them prevail" I couldn't agree more.
The reality of life is that the good suffer and die young and the evil never pay for their "sins" Well almost never.
That's why I don't believe in karma. Dick Cheney is proof, and look at Trump one of he evilest bastard to walk the earth and he is still trucking along, wreaking havoc and destroying people and lives.
Not to be too much of a Pollyanna, William, but I think the ‘karma’ that besets that nastiest people is the reality that they never truly experience joy and peace and the warmth of other people. Yes, they get to prance on the world stage and show off their wealth and how they’re “having fun” all around the planet, exhibiting powerful influence over others, and basking in the empty praise of sycophants … But they are barren, heartless bastards, and they don’t experience he grace that I have in my life when I am with my family and community and looking out over the forests and hills here in Vermont.
YES, I know, that’s small comfort, when someone like Donald J Trump gets to stuff his bank account with billions of crookedly earned dollars, and he gets to eat sumptuous feasts while others struggle to put a hot dog on their table … I know that.
We do need to keep up our struggle to get the man out of power. But I don’t really think he’s happy. I’m not sure if he was EVER really happy.
Also, for your readers - the documentary about Roy Cohn is fascinating. In particular, two of his cousins are interviewed and have quite a lot to say about Roy, including that he “ruined this country”.
Whew!!! Thom, thank you for this. My dad’s foreign service career was ruined by. McCarthy and Roy Cohn. It changed the entire course of our lives. My parents just sort of withdrew from parenting, just became numb. As the eldest by eight years. I ended up parenting my two brothers. I fled the US eventually and married a Moroccan diplomat, which was a monstrous mistake. The oldest of my brothers ended up getting himself murdered in Mexico and my youngest brother ended up with brain damage from an automobile accident. He had been taking cocaine while drinking beer. I sort of know that had the McCarthy stuff not happened our lives would have been much different. Political trauma rolls down the generations—seven according to the Bible. And I think that depends on whether other stuff happens and how parental trauma impacts the children and grandchildren etc. Anyway, I have no words to express my gratitude for your work. Thank you. 💕
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? Decency? What's that?
Most Americans have a stereotype of politicians as being crooked, mostly men, who strive for power and wealth through corruption. Trump's "Drain the swamp" campaign amplified that stereotype and misled MAGA voters into thinking he was going to bring justice to all those crooked politicians who were stealing their tax dollars to get rich. Trump learned from Cohn and others that anger and resentment motivate political support.
When Trump was caught feeding the pythons and alligators in the DC swamp, he cleverly asserted that he was just another one of their victims. It was the radical socialist/communist Democrats who were trying to bring down his presidency. It worked, and his impeachments lost momentum and popular support. Nevertheless, they wounded him politically.
When he ran for a second term, enough voters were suspicious of Trump's ethics as top US executives like Tillerson were resigning and calling him a corrupt lunatic. The Democrats ran Old Reliable Lackluster Joe, who won on being the lesser of two evils. Biden might have won a second term had his ego not put his growing dementia on national TV. It also unmasked that the DNC was led by out-of-touch geezers, as betrayed by their hasty replacement - a lackluster Veep.
But Trump suffered from the same shrinking frontal lobes problem as Biden. Once back in office, lacking a moral compass, Trump's dementia is unintentionally alienating his own supporters. One minute all foreigners are exploiting America's workforce, so he is ending H-1B visas to keep out the foreigners. The next minute, Trump is going on TV asserting that America needs foreign "experts" because our workforce is not as smart as foreign ones. One minute, he is announcing a major reduction in foreign college students. The next minute, he is announcing plans to admit hundreds of thousands of Chinese students (likely as part of a "Deal" with Xi to undo Trump's tariff damage).
In the end, it is dishonorable people who eventually fail as leaders.
Trump was the poster boy for employer sanctons for using illegals on his job sites. Trump Inc still uses temporary visas to displace locals at Mar a Lago and Doral.
Exactly. Given Trump's family history, the dementia common to frontal lobe shrinking that we all develop in our 70s has accelerated bigly. In advanced cases, it impedes recall and retards impulse control. We regularly see Trump confuse the names of people and even countries on the evening TV news. In the past several months, we have been seeing an increase in reckless decisions that undermine his political popularity.
The Mar-a-Lago Roaring 20's parties being held while millions of voters cannot afford to feed their families due to a lack of food stamps was grand mal elite arrogance. His impulsive killing of the H-1B visa program with $100K fees justified to open up jobs to working Americans, was politically clever. However, when just days later, while trying to explain his retraction justified by insulting the entire US workforce as lacking expertise common in other countries, his remarks were beyond brain-dead from a political point of view. It was also baseless. It is hard to ignore that his organization currently employs over 200 staff holding H-1Bs.
Fear and loathing has landed on MTG's doorstep---A lesson this weekend from Thom's book.
Marjorie Taylor Green is getting the Roy Cohn treatment in a couple of ways. First portion: attack, deny, declare victory. The second part: TRump is acting like she is dead to him.
"Studies show that psychopaths are attracted to and tend to form relationships with other psychopaths. While the general population doesn't find psychopathic traits like lack of empathy and manipulativeness attractive, those with psychopathic tendencies are drawn to similar traits in others."-AI Overview
MTG may have truly found her conscience. She SEEMS to identify with the Epstein victims and people needing affordable insurance.
BUT, will the real MTG please stand up? Private security agencies have warned her that she is in danger. From her account this weekend: "The toxic violent nature of American politics must end.". So true, TRump/Cohn tactics ruin lives. They can get people killed. Too bad it had to happen to her, before she understood. Has she stopped participating in the Cult? See you in the streets.
Great observation! It’s kind of nice to see someone getting well deserved comuppence, and by the very one she helped make. What is the old saying? You get in bed with dogs…
I tend to agree with you about, “But, will the true MTG stand up?” She’s on the road to redemption. Taking her licks as a traitor to everyone decent, so she can make her resurrection in the future like a rising vampire from her coffin. I was lost, and now I’m found!
This history of Trump's 'upbringing' is painful but essential to know..history repeats so often and we learn from it. Thanks Thom, your daily messages are moving.
SO... read A Fever in the Heartland (2023) by Timothy Egan who recounts the tragic rise of the KKK in the US in the early 1920s. Complete with white robes and masks KKK had many millions of followers populating all levels of government and society..like Trump their 'charismatic' leader D.C.Stephenson attacked Blacks, Catholics, Jews, immigrants..and violently, personally, attacked women.
Egan wrote The Worst Hard Time about the 1930s Dust Bowl in the panhandle and his latest book shows how violence and prejudice can live and prosper side by side. KKK members were everywhere, clean and social in daytime and violent at night. They were aimed at the US Presidency. It is a model for our time, and his Pulitzer Prize winning writing is a warning to us today.
Note that Heather Cox Richardson described this 1920s KKK onslaught in her daily Letter from an American on November 2, 2025.
Thom, your outstanding report should be mandatory reading by the entire tRUMP administration, every member of Congress, the Supreme Court and Governor of every state.
My sister was at one of his parties. She said he soon disappeared into a bedroom with two men and didn't come out for a long time. Of course being gay didn't stop him from joining McCarthy in using innuendo to attack State Department people as being homosexuals open to blackmail by the Soviet Union, and so should be fired, whether they were or not.
Meanwhile J Edgar Hoover was covering himself with macho swagger...Way back when I was in ROTC an officer teaching my class talked about gay people being ripe for blackmail by the Soviets, which in fact apparently happened a few times. Therefore they could not be allowed in sensitive (or in fact any) official positions. I replied that if they were just allowed to come forward then there would be nothing to blackmail them about. He was not amused.
The chapter you shared with us this week adds so much clarity to Trump's decisions and the moral depravity that guides him. As I read this, I can't help but think that America's democracy was hacked by a man who is essentially following Mussolini's playbook move by move. How does this stop? If our institutions have been hacked, even an electoral win doesn't save us unless we have such a majority that we can assemble a Constitutional Conference and apply a software patch to the Constitution that prevents the very thing that has already occurred.
Even if we achieve that it's possible if Trump's hand were forced and he senses defeat as inevitable that he'll turn over the playing board. Then the choice is between actual authoritarianism or secession. I don't know that I've seen you use this latter word. Is it a viable option?
The point I'm going to take from this article is. KARMA IN THE END ...ENDED COHN. We can all take pleasure in the fact that She always does. Dt will get his in the end. And history will not be pleasant.
Wild how every villain in America’s story seems to have a spiritual godfather hiding in the footnotes. You read this chapter and see the lineage clear as bone. Trump didn’t invent the chaos. He inherited it. Cohn just taught him to wear it like cologne.
The sad part is how predictable it all is. Men who fear accountability always go hunting for mentors who never had any. And then they act shocked when the whole country starts smelling like their choices.
History isn’t subtle. It keeps telling us exactly who shapes these men. We just hate believing it.
"As Cohn approached death, Trump began to distance himself. The pattern would become familiar in Trump’s later life; the discarding of associates who could no longer serve his purposes. According to Roger Stone, a mutual associate: “When Roy got sick, Donald dropped him like a hot potato.”37
The final betrayal was particularly cruel. When Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS—a condition he denied to the end, insisting he had liver cancer—he reached out to Trump for support. Cohn had, after all, been Trump’s most important mentor, had guided his entry into Manhattan real estate, had protected him from the DOJ, had connected him with powerful figures who advanced his career. But Trump, sensing that Cohn was no longer useful and potentially a liability, distanced himself. When Cohn called asking Trump to find him a room at one of his hotels where he could recover, Trump reportedly promised to help but never called back."
May donold realize the same indignity...unloved, unwanted, ignored and penniless at death. Cruelty is the point, what comes round goes round.
“Where’s My Roy Cohn?”
Ans. Pam Bondi.
IMHO Trump could easily have avoided the NY case outcomes, but refused to accept advice. Also IMHO, he was fortunate that the Garland DOJ were duds. Tactically, could have snapped off all the low hanging fruit, who would have sold out Trump.
Although the Georgia prosecution was handicapped by the conduct of the prosecutoir, the door has not closed on many of the perps. The initial prosecutor, Fani Willis, was disqualified by the Court of Appeals in December 2024, and the prosecution is being continued by Pete Skandalakis.Other state cases may be in the pipeline.
Hopefully justice will eventually prevail.
IMHO- the ending of Cohn: sick, alone, power gone- would be fitting for trump as well.
Ayn Rand had the same ending, The goddess of individuality, of capitalism, died alone in a subsidized apartment, living on social security and Medicare.
Unfortunately a personal hero of mine, Nicholai Tesla, also died alone and broke in a NY apartment, alas he was a kind soul and taken advantage of by the likes of J P Morgan.
Not every decent person has a village that helps them prevail. Tesla deserved so much better. Cohn deserved less than he had most of his life, but his end was perfect karma. Trump deserves to go down in public disgrace, and we may be seeing the start of that now. I most certainly hope so!!
"Not every person has a village that helps them prevail" I couldn't agree more.
The reality of life is that the good suffer and die young and the evil never pay for their "sins" Well almost never.
That's why I don't believe in karma. Dick Cheney is proof, and look at Trump one of he evilest bastard to walk the earth and he is still trucking along, wreaking havoc and destroying people and lives.
Not to be too much of a Pollyanna, William, but I think the ‘karma’ that besets that nastiest people is the reality that they never truly experience joy and peace and the warmth of other people. Yes, they get to prance on the world stage and show off their wealth and how they’re “having fun” all around the planet, exhibiting powerful influence over others, and basking in the empty praise of sycophants … But they are barren, heartless bastards, and they don’t experience he grace that I have in my life when I am with my family and community and looking out over the forests and hills here in Vermont.
YES, I know, that’s small comfort, when someone like Donald J Trump gets to stuff his bank account with billions of crookedly earned dollars, and he gets to eat sumptuous feasts while others struggle to put a hot dog on their table … I know that.
We do need to keep up our struggle to get the man out of power. But I don’t really think he’s happy. I’m not sure if he was EVER really happy.
Small comfort, but there you go …
I changed my mind. I now prefer his ultimate demise to mimic that which ended Mussolini.
Cohn was Trump's mentor
Bondi is his sycophant.
Bondi is Trump's brain.
No argument there, but she got her job because she is a sycophant, Cohn on the other hand was his role model.
Great work, Thom - thank you!
Also, for your readers - the documentary about Roy Cohn is fascinating. In particular, two of his cousins are interviewed and have quite a lot to say about Roy, including that he “ruined this country”.
Whew!!! Thom, thank you for this. My dad’s foreign service career was ruined by. McCarthy and Roy Cohn. It changed the entire course of our lives. My parents just sort of withdrew from parenting, just became numb. As the eldest by eight years. I ended up parenting my two brothers. I fled the US eventually and married a Moroccan diplomat, which was a monstrous mistake. The oldest of my brothers ended up getting himself murdered in Mexico and my youngest brother ended up with brain damage from an automobile accident. He had been taking cocaine while drinking beer. I sort of know that had the McCarthy stuff not happened our lives would have been much different. Political trauma rolls down the generations—seven according to the Bible. And I think that depends on whether other stuff happens and how parental trauma impacts the children and grandchildren etc. Anyway, I have no words to express my gratitude for your work. Thank you. 💕
“Have you no sense of decency, sir? Decency? What's that?
Most Americans have a stereotype of politicians as being crooked, mostly men, who strive for power and wealth through corruption. Trump's "Drain the swamp" campaign amplified that stereotype and misled MAGA voters into thinking he was going to bring justice to all those crooked politicians who were stealing their tax dollars to get rich. Trump learned from Cohn and others that anger and resentment motivate political support.
When Trump was caught feeding the pythons and alligators in the DC swamp, he cleverly asserted that he was just another one of their victims. It was the radical socialist/communist Democrats who were trying to bring down his presidency. It worked, and his impeachments lost momentum and popular support. Nevertheless, they wounded him politically.
When he ran for a second term, enough voters were suspicious of Trump's ethics as top US executives like Tillerson were resigning and calling him a corrupt lunatic. The Democrats ran Old Reliable Lackluster Joe, who won on being the lesser of two evils. Biden might have won a second term had his ego not put his growing dementia on national TV. It also unmasked that the DNC was led by out-of-touch geezers, as betrayed by their hasty replacement - a lackluster Veep.
But Trump suffered from the same shrinking frontal lobes problem as Biden. Once back in office, lacking a moral compass, Trump's dementia is unintentionally alienating his own supporters. One minute all foreigners are exploiting America's workforce, so he is ending H-1B visas to keep out the foreigners. The next minute, Trump is going on TV asserting that America needs foreign "experts" because our workforce is not as smart as foreign ones. One minute, he is announcing a major reduction in foreign college students. The next minute, he is announcing plans to admit hundreds of thousands of Chinese students (likely as part of a "Deal" with Xi to undo Trump's tariff damage).
In the end, it is dishonorable people who eventually fail as leaders.
I loved the MAGAT response to Trump's allegation that we don't have "talented people" ... to jusify use of H1B visas. https://www.comicsands.com/trump-maga-h1b-visa
Trump was the poster boy for employer sanctons for using illegals on his job sites. Trump Inc still uses temporary visas to displace locals at Mar a Lago and Doral.
Exactly. Given Trump's family history, the dementia common to frontal lobe shrinking that we all develop in our 70s has accelerated bigly. In advanced cases, it impedes recall and retards impulse control. We regularly see Trump confuse the names of people and even countries on the evening TV news. In the past several months, we have been seeing an increase in reckless decisions that undermine his political popularity.
The Mar-a-Lago Roaring 20's parties being held while millions of voters cannot afford to feed their families due to a lack of food stamps was grand mal elite arrogance. His impulsive killing of the H-1B visa program with $100K fees justified to open up jobs to working Americans, was politically clever. However, when just days later, while trying to explain his retraction justified by insulting the entire US workforce as lacking expertise common in other countries, his remarks were beyond brain-dead from a political point of view. It was also baseless. It is hard to ignore that his organization currently employs over 200 staff holding H-1Bs.
Fear and loathing has landed on MTG's doorstep---A lesson this weekend from Thom's book.
Marjorie Taylor Green is getting the Roy Cohn treatment in a couple of ways. First portion: attack, deny, declare victory. The second part: TRump is acting like she is dead to him.
"Studies show that psychopaths are attracted to and tend to form relationships with other psychopaths. While the general population doesn't find psychopathic traits like lack of empathy and manipulativeness attractive, those with psychopathic tendencies are drawn to similar traits in others."-AI Overview
MTG may have truly found her conscience. She SEEMS to identify with the Epstein victims and people needing affordable insurance.
BUT, will the real MTG please stand up? Private security agencies have warned her that she is in danger. From her account this weekend: "The toxic violent nature of American politics must end.". So true, TRump/Cohn tactics ruin lives. They can get people killed. Too bad it had to happen to her, before she understood. Has she stopped participating in the Cult? See you in the streets.
Great observation! It’s kind of nice to see someone getting well deserved comuppence, and by the very one she helped make. What is the old saying? You get in bed with dogs…
I tend to agree with you about, “But, will the true MTG stand up?” She’s on the road to redemption. Taking her licks as a traitor to everyone decent, so she can make her resurrection in the future like a rising vampire from her coffin. I was lost, and now I’m found!
Reminds me of a dumb-down version of Liz Chaney.
The question is will we survive the consequences of Dump’s re-election.
This history of Trump's 'upbringing' is painful but essential to know..history repeats so often and we learn from it. Thanks Thom, your daily messages are moving.
SO... read A Fever in the Heartland (2023) by Timothy Egan who recounts the tragic rise of the KKK in the US in the early 1920s. Complete with white robes and masks KKK had many millions of followers populating all levels of government and society..like Trump their 'charismatic' leader D.C.Stephenson attacked Blacks, Catholics, Jews, immigrants..and violently, personally, attacked women.
Egan wrote The Worst Hard Time about the 1930s Dust Bowl in the panhandle and his latest book shows how violence and prejudice can live and prosper side by side. KKK members were everywhere, clean and social in daytime and violent at night. They were aimed at the US Presidency. It is a model for our time, and his Pulitzer Prize winning writing is a warning to us today.
Note that Heather Cox Richardson described this 1920s KKK onslaught in her daily Letter from an American on November 2, 2025.
Thom, your outstanding report should be mandatory reading by the entire tRUMP administration, every member of Congress, the Supreme Court and Governor of every state.
My sister was at one of his parties. She said he soon disappeared into a bedroom with two men and didn't come out for a long time. Of course being gay didn't stop him from joining McCarthy in using innuendo to attack State Department people as being homosexuals open to blackmail by the Soviet Union, and so should be fired, whether they were or not.
More than innuendo.
Agree, Daniel: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/cold-war-lavender-scare-and-lgbtq-activism.htm
Meanwhile J Edgar Hoover was covering himself with macho swagger...Way back when I was in ROTC an officer teaching my class talked about gay people being ripe for blackmail by the Soviets, which in fact apparently happened a few times. Therefore they could not be allowed in sensitive (or in fact any) official positions. I replied that if they were just allowed to come forward then there would be nothing to blackmail them about. He was not amused.
We discharged them on a"medical" basis.
Could not take the Florida Bar oath. Couldn't teach school.
Lee Atwater was of the same mold as Cohen. He even confessed his miserable tricks on his death bed.
The chapter you shared with us this week adds so much clarity to Trump's decisions and the moral depravity that guides him. As I read this, I can't help but think that America's democracy was hacked by a man who is essentially following Mussolini's playbook move by move. How does this stop? If our institutions have been hacked, even an electoral win doesn't save us unless we have such a majority that we can assemble a Constitutional Conference and apply a software patch to the Constitution that prevents the very thing that has already occurred.
Even if we achieve that it's possible if Trump's hand were forced and he senses defeat as inevitable that he'll turn over the playing board. Then the choice is between actual authoritarianism or secession. I don't know that I've seen you use this latter word. Is it a viable option?
The point I'm going to take from this article is. KARMA IN THE END ...ENDED COHN. We can all take pleasure in the fact that She always does. Dt will get his in the end. And history will not be pleasant.
Wild how every villain in America’s story seems to have a spiritual godfather hiding in the footnotes. You read this chapter and see the lineage clear as bone. Trump didn’t invent the chaos. He inherited it. Cohn just taught him to wear it like cologne.
The sad part is how predictable it all is. Men who fear accountability always go hunting for mentors who never had any. And then they act shocked when the whole country starts smelling like their choices.
History isn’t subtle. It keeps telling us exactly who shapes these men. We just hate believing it.
Right, Captain my Captain. Just don’t give a hoot about anyone else but yourself. Never, show weakness. That’s true. Hence, Trump.
This is the real donold trump...
"As Cohn approached death, Trump began to distance himself. The pattern would become familiar in Trump’s later life; the discarding of associates who could no longer serve his purposes. According to Roger Stone, a mutual associate: “When Roy got sick, Donald dropped him like a hot potato.”37
The final betrayal was particularly cruel. When Cohn was diagnosed with AIDS—a condition he denied to the end, insisting he had liver cancer—he reached out to Trump for support. Cohn had, after all, been Trump’s most important mentor, had guided his entry into Manhattan real estate, had protected him from the DOJ, had connected him with powerful figures who advanced his career. But Trump, sensing that Cohn was no longer useful and potentially a liability, distanced himself. When Cohn called asking Trump to find him a room at one of his hotels where he could recover, Trump reportedly promised to help but never called back."
May donold realize the same indignity...unloved, unwanted, ignored and penniless at death. Cruelty is the point, what comes round goes round.
Isn't Miller his new Roy Cohn?