Across the long arc of American legal and political culture, certain philosophies of power find their vessels and pass from hand to hand. Kai Bird's biography 'American Scoundrel' traces how Roy Cohn — prosecutor, McCarthy-era operative, and master of adversarial maneuvering — transmitted a complete worldview to a young Donald Trump in the 1970s: deny everything, attack always, and treat the law not as an arbiter of truth but as a weapon of attrition. The book arrives as a kind of historical reckoning, asking readers to consider not just the men involved, but how a particular understanding of