The Mentor: How Roy Cohn taught Donald Trump everything. (Kai Bird, Susan Goldmark, 8/09/26, The New Yorker)
Trump’s father, Fred, appears to have had a long history of racism. On Memorial Day, 1927, when Fred was twenty-one, he was arrested for refusing to disperse during a violent confrontation between police and a band of white-hooded Klansmen in Queens; he was released shortly after. (It’s unclear what role he played in the riot.) Almost thirty years later, a tenant living in one of Fred’s first major developments, the Beach Haven apartment complex, in Brooklyn, was so disturbed by the racial discrimination he observed from the management that he wrote a song about it. The song was called “Old Man Trump.” The tenant was Woody Guthrie.
I suppose that Old Man Trump knows just how much racial hate
He stirred up in that bloodpot of human hearts . . .
Beach Haven is Trump’s Tower
Where no Black folks come to roam
By 1973, when Trump met Cohn, the evidence that Fred’s company had discriminated against Black people seemed undeniable. According to the Justice Department filing, thirty-nine Trump-owned apartment buildings had systematically barred Black people from renting. The Feds had found four Trump superintendents or rental agents willing to confirm that applications were coded by race; the forms would be marked by a large capital “C” to indicate that the applicants were “colored.” One Trump employee described the policy to an F.B.I. agent: “Fred Trump told me not to rent to Blacks. He also wanted me to get rid of the Blacks that were in the building by telling them cheap housing was available to them at only five hundred dollars down payment, which Trump would offer to pay himself.” These activities would have been a clear violation of the 1968 Fair Housing Act.
The Feds would have been satisfied had the Trumps merely signed a consent decree, agreeing to integrate their approximately fifteen thousand units; there would have been no fine and no admission of guilt. But Cohn encouraged Trump to reject the decree, and to assert that the Feds were pressuring the company to rent to “welfare recipients.” Exasperated, the Justice Department filed a formal discrimination suit, whereupon Cohn countersued the government for defamation, seeking a hundred million dollars in damages. Cohn and Trump held a press conference at the New York Hilton to announce their suit. Steven Brill, the founder of The American Lawyer, later said that he had been stunned that any reporters had shown up: “You couldn’t get through your second day of law school without knowing it was a totally bogus lawsuit.”
The stunt, a show of bravado, dominated local headlines, but, a month later, a federal judge dismissed the Trumps’ suit as frivolous, scolding Cohn that he was “wasting time and paper.” Trump and Cohn refused to back down, and they refused to engage with the accusations of racism. A friend of Cohn’s told us that, in private, Cohn routinely referred to Black people as “the Schvartze,” a slur he’d picked up from his mother, Dora, and that on at least one occasion he was heard using the N-word. Trump always said that he was color-blind and that his only criterion for tenants was the income of the male head of household: “We don’t generally include the wife’s income. We like to see it for the male in the family.”
