HBO’s Roy Cohn Documentary Is a Lesson for Trump
In the late 1980s, when Tony Kushner was in the process of writing Angels in America, Kushner and the show’s co-director Oskar Eustis went to visit the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which had gone on display for the first time at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Amid the thousands of panels was one dedicated to the lawyer Roy Cohn. Underneath Cohn’s name, which was inscribed in plain black letters and enclosed inside a tight rectangular frame, were three words: BULLY. COWARD. VICTIM. “Tony looked at it,” Eustis later remembered, “and said, ‘If I can write something half as dialectical as that, it’ll be a great character.’”
Cohn possessed inherently theatrical qualities even before he was immortalized in : the naked venality, the emotionless against his former national security adviser John Bolton over Bolton’s forthcoming book, and the president is reportedly against his niece, Mary Trump, whose own book about him is slated for release in July.)
