Deal With The Devil, Marie Brenner, Vanity Fair, August 2017

In 1973, a brash young would-be developer from Queens met one of New York’s premier power brokers: Roy Cohn, whose name is still synonymous with the rise of McCarthyism and its dark political arts. At 27, Donald Trump took the ruthless attorney as his sometime guide, learning many of the tactics that would inexplicably propel him to the White House. MARIE BRENNER untangles the symbiosis that bound them until Cohn’s death from AIDS in 1986
…
And as Trump’s first major project, the Grand Hyatt, was set to open, he was already involved in multiple controversies. He was warring with the city about tax abatements and other concessions. He had hoodwinked his very own partner, Hyatt chief Jay Pritzker, by changing a term in a deal when Pritzker was unreachable—on a trip to Nepal.

My emphasis: so there is history between DT and Gov. Pritzker from way back. Well, well.

For author Sam Roberts, the essence of Cohn’s influence on Trump was the triad: “Roy was a master of situational immorality…. He worked with a three-dimensional strategy, which was: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counterattack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.” As columnist Liz Smith once observed, “Donald lost his moral compass when he made an alliance with Roy Cohn.”

The article goes on to connect Roger Stone (and Manafort) to Cohn and Trump, starting in 1979.