GIVE HIM THE BOY, HE'LL GIVE YOU THE MAN:

In "Angels", Roy serves as an object lesson in the cost of self-deceit. As in real life, he is gay, deeply closeted, dying of AIDS--which, even in his final months, he insists to the public is liver cancer--and accused of rampant ethical violations. Feeling obliged to lie about a central truth of his life, he grows so accustomed to deception that it becomes second nature. And he will stop at nothing to maintain his veneer of invincibility. Joe, a closeted, strait-laced Mormon, finally loses his faith in Roy when he asks Joe to abuse a job he has been offered in the attorney-general's office in order to protect Roy from disbarment.

This is a faithful representation of Cohn, a formative influence on Mr Trump. As Peter Fraser, Cohn's final lover, told the New York Times last year, "I hear Roy in the things he says quite clearly--that bravado, and if you say it aggressively and loudly enough, it's the truth. That's the way Roy used to operate to a degree, and Donald was certainly his apprentice." The president developed his approach to adversaries by watching Cohn humiliate them, in the media and in court: he once described his attack-dog attorney as "vicious to others in his protection of me".

Political pundits have consistently misread Mr Trump, predicting either that his star would fade or, later, that he would have to adapt to conventional expectations of the presidency. Mr Kushner's script would have provided a more accurate prognostication. Roy never changes his spots, remaining hateful even on his deathbed: "Better dead than red!" he screams at the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, the accused Russian spy he had helped send to the electric chair 30 years earlier. He refuses to share his precious stash of AZT, an experimental AIDS drug, with his nurse Belize, even when Roy's looming death means he has no more use for the pills. Those still waiting for Cohn's former client to "pivot" towards the centre should take note. And the lesson Mr Trump has taken from Cohn's ultimate defeat at the hands of hated bureaucrats--he was disbarred a few weeks before he died in 1986--was not the importance of playing by the rules but rather the perils of being laid low by illness. In the president's recollection, "they only got [Cohn] because he was so sick": a memory that may help explain his publishing a letter from his doctor during the 2016 campaign claiming Mr Trump would be the healthiest president ever elected.

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