It wasn’t so long ago that the oncefearsome lawyer Roy Cohn and his infamous career seemed destined to be no more than a colorful footnote to history. Cohn was a gaudy character, for sure — a hustler, a fixer, and an amoral hypocrite of incredible drive — whose life as a closeted man ended in tragic comeuppance when he died of AIDS in 1986, insisting to the last that he couldn’t possibly be dying of that gay disease.

Tony Kushner wrote a vivid version of him into Angels in America, and that might have been the last word on Cohn if not for the fact that, in midlife, he had met and started giving legal and howtogetawaywithit life advice to a thenyoung Donald Trump, helping mold him into the man who became president.