The Receding View of Rudy Giuliani

Rudy, We Definitely Knew Ya

First appeared in The Progressive Populist

Rudy Giuliani had won. In 2005, four years after the attacks on the World Trade Center — attacks on America, if you’re speechifying — he made more than $10 million from delivering 108 speeches around the world to Wall Street banks; oil, gold mining, and pharmaceutical companies; and investor groups in Japan and Singapore.

They wanted to know how it felt.

He was, to quote the then-host of Meet the Press, the late Tim Russert, “America’s Mayor” for his calm after the terrorist attacks. He was Time’s “Man of the Year.” There was talk of allowing him to run for another term, even though New York City law limits mayors to two consecutive four-year terms.

Even when then-Sen. Joe Biden described Giuliani this way: “Rudy Giuliani — There’s only three things he [needs] to make … a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11,” nobody cared. In fact, they were paying huge honoraria to hear him say it over and over. A 2002 Marist College poll showed that Republicans liked him 85% to 7%, but independents weren’t far behind, at 77-11, and Democrats gave him sterling numbers as well, at 74-10.

There were always problems with that praise. He was a world-class putz. As mayor, he was sued 34 times by the New York Civil Liberties Union (26 successfully); he banned critics from protesting at City Hall; he supported stop-and-frisk policies aimed at Blacks and Hispanics. Even his crowning achievement, his stewardship of New York after the attack, was called into question. He had made a bonehead decision to place NYPD’s entire emergency command center at 7 World Trade Center, even though he was warned it would be vulnerable if a truck bomb hit it.

A Boeing 767 hit it.

None of that matter to those who booked town halls across the nation.

In 2008, flush with money, he ran for president. He finished third in the Florida primary behind John McCain and Mitt Romney.

It stung.

But first, more money.

He established a management consulting business; he was shilling for LifeLock™.

But he wasn’t a player, wasn’t a national presence.

John McCain was the maverick.

Rudy Giuliani became a courtier.

He had known Trump, obviously, when he was mayor. Trump, too, was going through wives quicker than he was releasing falsified business records. There’s an infamous picture of both of them in drag, hugging at something called a Mayor’s Inner City Press Roast in 2000. In the video — and the skit was done for charity — Trump nuzzled his face into Mr. Giuliani’s fake breasts.

“Oh, you dirty boy, you!” the mayor exclaimed and slapped Mr. Trump in the face.

Giuliani got that part right.

He had found his way back in.

He went to the 2016 Republican convention and, channeling his obsequiousness and self-aggrandizement, said Trump was a man “with a big heart” and that “What I did for New York City, Donald Trump will do for America.”

Rudy’s implosion was live and in color. There was the silly stuff: appearing on Russert’s old show, Meet the Press, and telling Chuck Todd, “Truth isn’t truth”; going on a Tel Aviv station and vouching for Trump’s fidelity. But his newfound embrace of buffoonery also included peddling Ukrainian and Russian propaganda.

After Trump lost in 2020, whatever integrity Giuliani had left — and there wasn’t much — was running down his face like bad hair dye under bright lights.

He had embarrassed himself outside a landscaping company in Pennsylvania, alleging the election had been stolen. He fondled himself in Sacha Baron Cohen’s “Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm” in front of a woman he was trying to seduce. Hunter Biden sued him for violating his privacy over data allegedly taken from his laptop. He had been found guilty of falsely claiming Ruby Freeman and Andrea “Shaye” Moss, two Georgia election workers, committed ballot fraud — he alleged they were passing around USB ports of voting information like they were vials of heroin or cocaine — and was ordered to pay them $148 million. Noelle Dunphy, a former employee of his, accused Giuliani of sexual assault and wage theft, and called him “a hard-drinking, Viagra-popping womanizer who made satisfying his sexual demands an absolute requirement” of her employment. Former Trump aide Cassidy Hutchinson said he tried to finger her on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Trump rally on the Ellipse in Washington. He was indicted on 13 felony counts for violating the Georgia RICO act, which includes forgery, making false statement, and impersonating a public officer. He has been sued by voting-machine companies Dominion and Smartmatic for defamation. He has had his law licenses suspended in New York and Washington, D.C. He has declared bankruptcy.

He went to Donald Trump, the man for whom he did all the above, to get help with legal expenses.

Trump refused.

Giuliani had made a deal with the devil and the devil wasn’t keeping up his end of the deal.

In September 2023, Giuliani’s favorability rating was at 16%.

To paraphrase Ernest Hemingway in “The Sun Also Rises,” Giuliani’s fall happened “gradually, then suddenly.”

On the day Arizona indictments were handed down, April 24 — he and 10 other Trump allies were indicted in Phoenix for trying to overturn the 2020 election loss — I was thinking about whether Giuliani ever thinks instead of waking up that day broke, disbarred, and mocked, he’s waking up in a suite at the ADERO Scottsdale Resort, after collecting yet another fat check for another subject-verb-9/11 speech? Would he give up the past eight years with Trump to get it back, to still be America’s Mayor?

Short answer: no.

Here’s what he said about the Arizona indictment: “This is just straight-out communist corruption. These people are massive crooks — the people in Arizona. They’re despicable, anti-American traitors.”

Giuliani, the pragmatic NYC mayor, the RINO, the pro-abortion Republican, the one who put aside politics in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, never existed.

We wanted him to.

This is all the Rudy Giuliani there ever was.

In March, in an interview on WABC 77 radio in New York, Giuliani said he had stuck to his principles and that he thought his loyalty to Trump would “help me in Heaven.”.”