If President Donald Trump doesn't have a fight, he creates one. It's a tactic he learned from his confrontational mentor Roy Cohn, who managed to stir up Congressional drama with former Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI) during a "red scare."
"If you look at the long, public life of Donald Trump -- half a century at this point -- what we are looking at right now that’s the current bookend," said Politico senior staff writer Michael Kruse. "The first bookend goes all the way back to October of 1973. That starts when the Department of Justice sues Donald Trump, Fred Trump, his father and Trump’s management for racist rental statuses and many offices in Staten Island."
When that happened, it put Trump in a position where he had to fight, and he hired Roy Cohn to do it.
Cohn, "not only mounts a defense for Donald Trump particularly but kind of gives Donald Trump a young and impressionable Donald Trump a tutorial on how to fight the Department of Justice and how to fight any entity or institution that’s attacking you, that’s getting in your way from going where you want to go and doing what you want to do," Kruse continued. "So the Cohen’s playbook, deny, delay, counter-attack and shamelessness as a weapon. Here we are 50 years later, we see a lot of Roy Cohn in Donald Trump."
Kruse went on to say that if Trump doesn't have someone to fight he will find someone.
"He’s the most effective when he’s fighting and if he does not have a legitimate fight, he creates a fight," Kruse said. "He does not create a fight here. Now more than ever before, he has been very adept at using fights as fuel and so I think the political calculations are what they are."
Watch the full panel discussion below:
