Being a criminal defense lawyer has, unsurprisingly, provided me with the opportunity to speak with a great many people who are inclined to commit crimes. It has allowed me to recognize the pathologies, the different worldview of people who put their self-interest above all else. Hard as it is for some to imagine, there are people who, for whatever reason, see the constraints of ethics, morality, virtues and humility as either the tools of fools or gambits to be played for one’s own advantage to win the game. There is, at least in their grasp of reality, nothing that matters except winning the game, and everything else is a mere weapon to be employed as needed to win.

Roy Cohn was such a person. So too is his weak-minded protégé.

At this point in the Trumpian arc, we’re all too familiar with the president’s methods: Deny everything; apologize for nothing. Hog the spotlight. Counterattack, counterpunch, countersue. Always declare victory, even when you lose (especially when you lose). Resentment sells. Nativism sells. Cruelty, if not yet normal, becomes the norm. Rules and traditions are for suckers; everyone is, if not corrupt, at least corruptible.

These are President Trump’s instincts, yes. But before they were his, they were Roy Cohn’s.

On the eve of Trumpapaloosa, the novel midterm party convention designed by Trump to make the midterm elections a referendum on whether you love Trump or you really love Trump, the president will speak on both nights about how great he is, how great his accomplishments are, and how great he really, really is.

Is it all a lie? To those of us who view truth and falsity as ends in themselves, that lying is an inherently bad thing that not only seeks to deceive, but renders the liar inherently untrustworthy such that nothing he says can be believed based on him saying so, this is a bad thing. To those who embrace the Roy Cohn ethos, it’s nothing more than an effective use of a tool to manipulate and control the views of weak-minded people, some might call them “losers,” who deserve to be lied to because they’re too stupid to realize they’re being played.

This is the game being played by Trump, who has surrounded himself with people whose purpose is to bolster his lies. One lies and the other swears to it. It takes a village, apparently.

The day after winning the 2016 election, Trump was on the phone with Roger Stone, his friend and adviser and longtime Cohn ally. “Wouldn’t Roy love to see this moment?” the president-elect said wistfully of Cohn, who died in 1986. “Boy, do we miss him.” And just months later, when the president fumed that Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general, was failing to protect him, an irate Trump demanded, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?”

But the fact that Trump’s understanding goes no further than Cohn’s playbook doesn’t mean Trump, the grasshopper, has achieved the mastery of Roy Cohn. In the New York Times, Carlos Lozada credits Trump with being as “Roy Cohn” as Cohn himself.

If he really wanted to find Cohn, all Trump had to do was look in the mirror.

Does Trump deserve this credit? Cohn was an innovator, evil though he may have been. Trump is merely a copycat, following Cohn’s playbook without contributing anything new to the banal mix. Cohn was sophisticated in his manipulation. Trump is laughably obvious and flagrant, fooling only those who desire to be fooled. Does anyone, even his most ardent supporters, believe Trump’s AI images showing a remarkably svelte Trump engaging in acts of manly violence?

But Trump has accomplished something that Cohn could only dream of: Trump is the president of the United States. Not only that, but he’s been elected twice, despite how poorly his first term went, reflecting how many felt about the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency in comparison. It might be hard to imagine a nation that would elect an amoral Roy Cohn impersonator, and yet that’s where we are.

Contrary to the fervent wishes of the MAGA faithful, Trump’s election was not necessarily an endorsement of Trump, but a rejection of the alternative. Whether the relative choice would be the same now, two years into Trump 2.0, is another matter. Does Trump see this? Realize this? Care about this?

In an interview with Times reporters early this year, Trump said that the only constraint he felt on his power was, well, himself. “My own morality,” he said. “My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Bird does not make this comparison, but Trump’s words evoke Cohn’s, yet again, from a Penthouse interview 45 years ago. “I decided long ago to make my own rules,” he said, “to act according to my own choices, my own judgments and my own conscience.”

Where’s our Roy Cohn? Sitting in the Oval Office.

Is Roy Cohn sitting in the Oval Office, or is the tired, fat old man with weird hair just a pale reflection of Cohn, who has managed to weasel his way into power because of how awful the alternative turned out to be and how disenchanted many Americans have become with the state of affairs that they would hold their nose and elect a more vulgar, deceitful, ignorant, narcissistic Roy Cohn wannabe in their desperate, misguided hope that the alternative to bad would be, if not good, at least better. If you wouldn’t elect Roy Cohn to be president, why would any rational person believe that his mediocre protégé should sit in the Krazy Glue-glittered Oval Office?