The Rise of Donald Trump from 1973 to 1985

The handsome future president of the United States of America, at the age of 27, meets Roy Marcus Cohn, a lawyer involved in sensational cases. As early as 1951, Cohn had a key role in the espionage trial on behalf of the USSR against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were later sentenced to death.

Cohn, legal counsel for the New York Yankees baseball team, Aristotle Onassis, mobsters Tony Salerno, Carmine Galante, and John Gotti, the owners of Studio 54, the Archdiocese of New York, as well as an informal advisor to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, becomes "infatuated" with the awkward young son of Fred Trump, a real estate developer accused of violating the law in renting out some of his properties. The case involved defending civil rights due to discriminatory policies against potential Black tenants, a case that Donald, under Cohn's guidance, would start handling as he sought to transform his business career.

Roy, a Columbia University law graduate, closeted homosexual, Jewish, homophobic, racist, misogynistic, amoral, mephistophelian manipulator, narcissist, and seemingly affected by a sadistic spectrum disorder where cruelty merges with excitement, pleasure, and other advantages, embodies the figure of a mentor—a kind of master of evil who imposes disorder in a world where the civil law must be discarded in favor of another law, the law of crime. After all, the world is divided into killers and losers.

A mentor of this caliber would inevitably leave his mark on the awkwardly talented Donald, who would ultimately surpass his master when the latter fell ill and died of AIDS at the age of 59, masking his illness with liver cancer.

Besides this pivotal figure who is key to understanding Trump's entrepreneurial and ruthless rise, there's also his relationship with Ivana, his future wife, initially unattainable but later determined to protect her own interests—though ultimately a victim of rape at the hands of her monstrous husband, as recorded in the divorce proceedings.

Beyond liposuction and his obsession with hair, the corpulent puppet is portrayed in all his mediocrities, banalities, and vulgarities—none particularly grotesque or monstrous.

However, Roy Cohn’s cardinal rules become embedded in Trump's business, financial, political, and criminal DNA:

• Attack, attack, attack

• Deny everything

• Claim victory and never admit defeat

The Faustian pact between the two is convincingly represented: by mocking the young apprentice, Roy manages to lead him to a total emotional detachment, even from his own family, abandoning any superfluous notion of ethics, morality, and empathy.

The use of recording and blackmailing any interlocutor in the economic, political, legal, and financial world becomes the conventional tool employed by the Mephistophelean lawyer.

After all, at Roy's sodomitical and homophobic parties, "only the accused are invited" because "making money is an art," as Andy Warhol would say!

Manhattan is the triumph of promiscuous enjoyment, where transgression and dancing euphoria reign, introducing the teetotaler Donald to social ascension and the delusional power of oppression and illegality represented by Trump Tower and later by investments in the gambling industry in Atlantic City, the Las Vegas of the East Coast.

The irony of the duplicity of double standards provides the film with the basic nihilistic premise upon which the disvalues that form the foundation of capitalist transformation and the inversion of means and ends are built.

04-Oct-2024 by Beatrice