Who was Trump's biggest mentor?

Was it Roy Cohn, like in "The Apprentice," or Yankees owner George Steinbrenner?

Donald Sr., Donald Jr., George Steinbrenner, and Billy Martin in 1988

There’s a biopic, The Apprentice, out now that argues that Donald Trump is most of all the protege of legendary evil lawyer Roy Cohn.

For a putative superlawyer, Cohn’s role in inadvertently ending America’s Red Scare is hilarious. (I’m drawing my summary from Tom Wolfe’s review of two biographies of Cohn.)

To be his chief of staff, Senator Joe McCarthy had two energetic candidates who wanted the job: Robert F. Kennedy Sr. and Roy Cohn, a gay Jewish legal prodigy who’d prosecuted the Rosenberg Jewish spies to the gas chamber.

Because so many Communist spies were Jews, McCarthy felt it looked better to pick a Jew to be his right hand man, while hiring another Irish Catholic like RFK would make it look like a Catholic crusade against godless Jews.

So, McCarthy picked the gay Jewish lawyer Cohn who proceeded to unintentionally wreck his boss Joe McCarthy’s career in the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings by making a huge national whoop-tee-doo over Cohn’s fevered belief that the U.S. Army was run by the Kremlin as proven by how the Army had drafted his beloved crush, fellow McCarthy staffer G. David Schine, and wouldn’t post the tall, handsome rich kid anywhere near McCarthy’s lovelorn chief-of-staff.

Schine and Cohn double-dating at the Stork Club

Eventually, the Army’s ace lawyer, Joe Welch, maneuvered Senator Joe into saying the word “fairy” on the record on national TV, and McCarthy’s popularity collapsed as Americans came to see the McCarthy Era as another Big Gay Conservative Fiasco.

(Schine never spoke of that time again. He moved to Hollywood, married Miss Sweden, had six kids, and won the Best Picture Oscar for producing The French Connection.)

I presume this amusing part of the Roy Cohn Story isn’t in the movie because it tends to undermine the unstoppable sinister Svengali image of Cohn in the conventional wisdom since Angels in America.

But with the New York Yankees in the World Series, it’s timely to bring up some things I’ve written about another mentor of Donald Trump, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner. What’s more unusual about Donald Trump: his Cohn-like supposed behind-the-scenes ruthlessness (aren’t many prominent individuals like that when out of the spotlight?) or his George Steinbrenner-like philosophy of love-me-or-hate-me, just put the spotlight on me?

Back in 2018, Paul Krugman asked in the New York Times:

Does anyone doubt that Trump would like to go full authoritarian, given the chance?

Well, me.

I think Trump would be bored by the second hour of a “full authoritarian” regime and let his critics out of the soccer stadiums to give him back somebody to clash with. In fact, I don’t think there is anybody in American public life who loves the conflict of democratic politics more than Trump. Maybe Pat Buchanan, who doesn’t take conflict as personally and is more able to put himself in the other man’s shoes than Trump is, but that’s about it.

Authoritarianism in the European sense that brought to power both Hitler (bad) and De Gaulle (not bad) was connected to the feeling that partisan debate was unseemly. Trump, on the other hand, loves conflict. His enemies typically hate him because they find his love of conflict unseemly. They long for a philosopher-king like Obama under whom they can serve as PR flacks crafting “national conversations” in which the citizenry’s job is to shut up and listen to their betters’ talking points.

Admittedly, I see Trump as the second coming of his role model George Steinbrenner, so I view Trump through the lens of the 1977-1981 World Series rivalry of Steinbrenner’s New York Yankees and the O’Malley family’s Los Angeles Dodgers. (Steinbrenner’s Yankees won in 1977 and 1978, O’Malley’s Dodgers in 1981.)

The O’Malleys, in contrast, ran a super-authoritarian corporation where everybody, even a Steinbrennerish / Trumpish personality like manager Tommy Lasorda, had to follow the corporate PR line that everything was copacetic behind the occluded mask. The L.A. Dodgers were extremely opaque and had largely co-opted the media into going along with their strategy.

Occasionally, behind-the-scenes tidbits would slip out from behind the Blue Media Wall that were so juicy that even the Dodger front office couldn’t keep them covered up, like US Senate candidate Steve Garvey and Hall of Famer Don Sutton having a locker room fistfight over Sutton saying Reggie Smith was better than Garvey, and perhaps over rumors that Mrs. Garvey was sleeping with Oscar-winning composer Marvin Hamlisch.

Or there was the time in 1978 that Dave Kingman of the Cubs hit three homers to beat the Dodgers in 15 innings. Afterwards, a reporter asked Lasorda to comment:

This story spread hand-to-hand among Dodger fans who made samzidat copies of cassette tapes of the interview and gave them to friends.

In contrast, the early Steinbrenner Yankees of 1977-1981 were the most public controversy-friendly baseball team of all time, with Steinbrenner, manager Billy Martin, free agent superstar Reggie Jackson, and catcher Thurman Munson engaged in a war of all against all carried out on the back covers of the New York tabloids.

Trump took from Steinbrenner the lesson that there’s no such thing as bad publicity as long as they spell your name right.

Unlike most team owners of the times, Steinbrenner battled constantly with his players and managers, especially Martin whom he fired five times. Virtually every week seemed like a crisis if you were reading the sports pages. From 1975-1989, Steinbrenner changed managers 18 times, winning two World Series.

Eventually, Steinbrenner slowed down and let Joe Torre win four World Series for him. And in the 1990s, Larry David played Steinbrenner (with his back to the camera) on Seinfeld as a more grandfatherly figure than he had cut in the 1970s.

In 2017, Business Insider reported:

Trump doesn’t toss around such a label frequently, at least in the press. But in Steinbrenner, the famed, bombastic owner, Trump saw a role model. …

Ray Negron, a Yankees employee for more than 40 years who serves as a columnist for Newsmax, told Business Insider that Steinbrenner was a “very strong mentor” to Trump. …

“And he looked at Steinbrenner as a big brother, as a hero, and you know he don’t look at anybody that way,” Negron continued. “They were both the same.”

… “Throughout the years he always called Mr. Steinbrenner … in any type of scenario. He would always checked in on him, and ‘The Boss’ always gave him what he thought was the right advice.”…

He made note that Trump borrowed his trademark phrase for his NBC show, “The Apprentice,” from Steinbrenner, who first popularized “you’re fired” in his years-long, love-hate relationship with manager Billy Martin, whom Steinbrenner hired and fired a total of five times.

Trump “borrowed that from the great George Steinbrenner, and people forget that,” Negron said. “I even used to ask ‘The Boss’ if he got upset with that and he said, ‘Imitation is the greatest form of flattery.'”