Roy Cohn, the world’s highest-paid lawyer, has been Trump’s model.

19 September 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On September 17th, NPR’s “Fresh Air” program headlined “’American Scoundrel’ traces Roy Cohn’s playbook from McCarthyism to Trump”, and interviewed Kai Bird on his new book American Scoundrel, about Roy Cohn’s having turned out to have been Trump’s teacher, exemplar, and model, for how Trump has subsequently behaved and won the Presidency and been serving as the U.S. President. Cohn was known for having prosecuted Julius and Ethel Rosenberg who went to the electric chair, and then served as Joe McCarthy’s Chief Counsel to destroy the careers of politically leftist scientists and writers, and then became the leading lawyer for Mafia bosses and many celebrities or billionaires, such as Onassis, Steinbrenner, the Newhouses, Studio 54, and Trump and other NYC real-estate billionaires.

The interviewer, Terry Gross, asked Bird, “You say that Roy Cohn’s rules became Trump rules. Now, there were a couple of Cohn rules that became Trump rules that I was familiar with, like never admit you were wrong. Deny, deny, deny. And then when there are charges against you, delay, delay, delay. Can you think of an example where all three were used by Roy Cohn?” And Bird replied:

Yeah, during the time in the ’60s when he was indicted three times. Roy Cohn delayed the courtroom proceedings as often as he could. He denied the allegations. He attacked the judge in particular by name. You know, he followed these rules throughout his life. And he was a routine rule breaker. You know, the rules were for the little guy, not for him.

GROSS: So did all of that help him get off on those charges?

BIRD: Well, the evidence was really quite overwhelming. I argue in the book, along with my coauthor, my wife, Susan Goldmark, that he was partly just damn lucky. You know, on one trial, a juror’s father suddenly fell dead, and the judge felt compelled to declare a mistrial. On another occasion, Roy’s own lawyer suffered a heart attack in the courtroom, just as he was about to give the summation.

And the trial judge was going to declare a recess, and Roy steps forward and says, judge, I’ll do my own summation. And he did. And this was to his advantage, of course, because he had not chosen to take the witness stand, so he hadn’t been subjected to cross-examination. But he was allowed, over two days, to spend seven hours defending himself. And he did so brilliantly and apparently got some of the jurors weeping. And they acquitted him 12 to 0.

So, I asked ChatGPT:

“What was the lawyer Roy Cohn’s hourly fee, and what was that worth in today’s dollars?”

and was told that he charged per case, not hour. I then asked

“To calculate his hourly rate, estimate how much time he spent on each case and divide that number into what his charge for the case was.”

and got “approximately $3,500 per hour in today’s dollars.”

I then asked

“What lawyers today charge approximately (or more than) $3,500/hour?” and got a few, but it then said that a more reliable answer than that $3,500/hour would be to the question “Who was the highest-paid American lawyer of Cohn’s own era, and where did Cohn rank among them?” and I said “Please do,” and it found that “By 1989 — three years after Cohn died — the National Law Journal was still reporting $500/hour as essentially the summit of ordinary American legal billing.” And “Cohn was charging several times what ordinary top lawyers charged, while contemporary superstar lawyers were around $300–350/hour.” So, the superstar lawyers of today are, in inflation-adjusted dollars, making around ten times higher incomes than back in Cohn’s time. In Cohn’s time, no lawyer was raking in even nearly as much per hour as he did.

I then speculated “Maybe this explains WHY Cohn refused to name his hourly rate.” and it responded: “Yes. That is a plausible explanation, although we cannot establish it as Cohn’s motive.” I responded: “I oppose the existing legal custom of inferring motive ONLY on the basis of an individual’s admissions and explicit allegations regarding what one’s ‘motive’ was. Any such allegation ought to be distrusted if to trust it would be merely to ASSUME the statement to be honest. No such assumption should be allowed.” It responded that “The actual motive should be inferred from the entire evidentiary record,” and included in that, the individual’s mere allegations. I said that the latter should be “entirely excluded.” It replied “That produces a cleaner rule,” because self-serving mere allegations ought to be distrusted.

Anyway, it’s clear from Bird’s account in his interview, that the current American President has been, throughout Trump’s entire career, adhering to Cohn’s “rules.” He has been modeling himself upon Cohn’s remarkable success. Bird describes those rules, and they don’t derive from anything in the U.S. Constitution, but instead from capitalism, as it has been advocated ever since the 1760s when Adam Smith wrote the books on it. The U.S. Constitution is neutral as between that versus democratic socialism, but Trump and Cohn are/were entirely in the capitalist tradition, which is based upon the rules that produced this economy, not upon a government’s laws (much less the Constitution). It’s divorced from that. It’s free-floating. It is libertarian. He that has the dollars sets and changes the rules.

Bird’s book itself also makes clear that Cohn (very unlike Trump) was brilliant, not just ruthless. For example, it’s first chapter, “Boy Wunderkind,” says that as a boy, his father, a judge, discussed cases with him, and, “Roy insists that when he was ten he persuaded his father that ‘eyewitness’ testimony was unreliable. ‘We got beyond the case itself, into a philosophical discussion regarding eyewitness, and I wouldn’t be moved because it seemed crazy and unfair to convict a person based on a flash sighting, generally in extreme circumstances.’ Roy claimed that Judge Cohn never again upheld a conviction based solely on eyewitness testimony.” That ten-year-old boy soon grew into a young man who was obsessed with winning, and the Los Angeles Times noted of him: “‘Mr. Cohn is a very, very tough adversary,’ said Peter Sudler, a former assistant U.S. attorney who fought Cohn in two celebrated organized crime trials and the Studio 54 tax evasion case. He is an extremely able trial lawyer. … Whenever you went against Mr. Cohn, you knew you were in for the fight of your life.’” Cohn always did whatever he could to win, no matter whom his client was. And “His average client, Cohn once estimated, was worth nearly $20 million.” Cohn died in 1986. $20 million then is equivalent to $61 million today. He served money, NOT truth. In that way, too, Trump has followed the same rules. The difference (other than that Cohn was far smarter) is that Trump’s clients are billionaires, such as Miriam Adelson and Elon Musk.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.