This is fascinating article by Frank Rich in New York magazine about the powerful and mostly liberal Democrats who bent the rules on behalf of an ambitious, self-promoting young Donald Trump and his patron, the vile Roy Cohn.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/04/frank-rich-roy-cohn-the-original-donald-trump.html
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Whoa! Powerhouse article! A world us little people can hardly comprehend.
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Thanks. That really was fascinating. I sometimes think the people who covered Trump made assumptions about how much people outside of NYC knew about him.
Most of the people here who voted for him had no idea who he was outside The Apprentice. They don’t read NYC media coverage of NYC celebrities, understandably, so although he was very familiar to NY’ers that wasn’t true of people in Ohio.
They really didn’t get the information they needed when they needed it. Maybe they would have elected him anyway, but I think one has to TRY to inform them instead of assuming this person is “known” in any real sense.
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I think you have to have been a New Yorker and of a certain age to get the gist of the article and how deep the ties are between Trump and the highflier in NY. I am old enough to remember the McCarthy Hearings and some of the history embedded in this account–but never with any of the insider knowledge in this article. It made my head spin.
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It is an amazing article. I have lived in NYC since 1960, with a few years in DC in the middle, and even I was amazed by the ties between Roy Cohn and Trump.
Among what I consider respectable people, Cohn was traife, which is Yiddish for not kosher, unacceptable. A very unethical man whose company you would not want to keep.
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If this were a novel, people would say that it was far-fetched and implausible that someone like Trump could ever become president. But here we are at ground zero for stupid and brutish, the Trump era.
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And let’s not forget “Democrats for Education Reform” (DFER) who represent hedge fund money and Wall Street, and who use tons of “dark money” to open the political doors in state capitols for increasing expansion of charter schools. And remember, too, that Obama was the keynote speaker at the inaugural meeting of DFER and that Obama then went on to appoint virulently pro-charter school Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education to oversee the eight-year exponential expansion of charter schools. Dems are no friends of public schools or of public school teachers. The Dems just know that there’s nowhere else for teachers to turn and treat teachers on a cynical take-it-or-leave-it basis.
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“It’s a realm where everyone has his (or her) price, and clout is always valued higher than any civic good. All that matters is the next transaction. Since time immemorial, those who find it unsavory are invariably dismissed as naïve.”
One has to have no morals to live in this world. If one lives here, everything is up for grabs. Lying is prevalent and so is doing everything behind someone else’s back. Love one another and get stabbed at the same time. What a great life. Those who endure it are beneath my comprehension and get all of my disdain. I expect better and will always be disappointed. Wealth brings out the worst in mankind.
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I don’t know much about Roy Cohn, but I remember a lot about what this story claims about Trump….. and I don’t live in NY and I never did. This was all common knowledge if anyone cared to take notice.
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