Lying and denial go hand in hand. Every time a lie is told, a denial must be concocted to protect the lie by denying that it is a lie. What Donald Trump realized decades ago when he was pursuing fame in the New York tabloids is that his denials did not need facts or evidence to back them up. Protecting his lies needed repetition, first of the lie, then of the denial, then of attacks on his accusers.

It’s been written that Trump learned this from his mentor, Roy Cohn, who was a criminal attorney in both senses of the words. But Trump didn’t need to learn how to lie and protect his lies from Roy Cohn. His own father taught him a master class in lying with his racist practice of either refusing to rent apartments to Black people or “steering” them into substandard dwellings and charging them more rent than he charged White people.

Donald Trump began working for his father’s real estate company in 1968, according to a 2016 article in the New York Times. He visited construction sites driven in his father’s Cadillac by a Black chauffeur and accompanied his father on visits to building managers of Trump rental properties. In 1973, the Department of Justice sued the Trump company, then known as Trump Management Inc., under the Fair Housing Act for discriminating on the basis of race against Black people. Donald Trump was named in the suit, along with his father, Fred Trump. Instead of settling with the government as other real estate companies had done when confronted with their racist practices, the Trumps hired Roy Cohn and went on the offensive, denying the DOJ’s charges and even filing their own $100 million defamation countersuit against the government. Cohn and the Trumps also took to the media, accusing the government of trying to force them to rent to “welfare recipients” and engaging in character assassination against government lawyers, even filing a contempt of court charge against one government attorney and accusing her of “turning the investigation into a ‘Gestapo-like interrogation,’” according to the Times report.

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The case dragged on for two years. Finally, the judge dismissed both the contempt charge and the defamation countersuit, and the Trumps signed a consent........

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