When Borat 2 came out, and we saw the edited, embarrassing footage of Rudy Giuliani, I thought of the old joke, “Time wounds all heels.” 35 years ago, Rudy Giuliani was a Federal prosecutor with a self-polished image of being the man who brought down the mafia in the US. 25 years ago, he was the free speech and due process-squashing mayor of New York who was brought to power on the crest of a racist backlash against David Dinkins, mainly from voters in Staten Island and Queens. 15 years ago, he was still riding his title of “America’s Mayor,” and was gearing up for a ill-fated presidential run in 2008. But if you can remember, that new title saved him for a while. He didn’t have nine lives, but 9/11 was one of his three major career shifts. His three significant career phases were US Attorney, big city mayor, and paid homeland security celebrity.
By the time of the 2001 mayoral primary (on the morning of September 11), Giuliani was not liked in New York City. The citizens had enough of him, his bullying, his disregard for the Bill of Rights, and his very public and embarrassing divorce. They were sick of his bratty son, Andrew, as well as his new girlfriend, Judith Nathan. They were ready for him to leave. Just over a year before his career was rescued by a terrorist attack, Giuliani had a disastrous month in his failed bid to run against Hillary Clinton for Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s Senate seat. But 9/11 actually made America forget how nuts he was for about seven years. During that time, he cashed-in and gave six-figure talks at conferences as a so-called expert on terrorism and foreign policy. He also opened a bullshit consulting firm, Giuliani Partners. Giuliani had a renewed political and professional life until Joe Biden, of all people, cut him down.
Joe Biden dispatched Giuliani during a Democratic presidential debate in 2007. “A noun, and a verb and 9/11” pretty much summed him up, as Joe Biden called him unfit for any future office. At that moment, Giuliani was finally done. He had no lucrative future. I can now add Borat, crackpot conspiracies, and heavy drinking to the long list of disqualifications for "America's Mayor”. The site of his November 7 rant, masquerading as a press conference, was held in a landscaping company parking lot, perfectly located between a sex shop and a crematorium.
New Yorkers are currently annoyed by a mayor who falsely claims to be a progressive, who shamelessly attempted to enrich his wife as a senior staffer, and is generally a depressing disappointment in leadership. However, I have to remind my fellow city residents that with Giuliani, we had a deeply corrupt mayor, who demonized people who were tortured and killed by police, who exhibited strange behavior, and annoyingly inserted himself into Christmas with his name being Rudolph. We’ve forgotten the clip below, but we must not forget. In 2000, when this video was shot, these two men were jokes.
Notice this video was shot in a department store (is this Loehmann’s?), which is quite prophetic given the active defamation lawsuit against Trump from Jean E. Carroll, who alleges that Trump raped her in a Bloomingdale’s dressing room in 1996.
Rudy’s drag alter ego, “Rudia,” lasted about three years, from 1997-2000. Giuliani’s friendship with Donald Trump goes back 34 years. And in this decade, the two men have only gotten closer. Rudy pledged his full loyalty to Trump and delivered an insane speech at the 2016 RNC. In that speech, Giuliani delivered to the media the first of many iconic images of a man in decline. Soon after Trump took office, Trump lost Michael Cohen and turned to Giuliani as his personal attorney, fixer, and rat fucker. That’s when we saw Giuliani’s behavior take a much more disturbing turn in the spring of 2019.
I am not going to go through the whole saga, which is apparently ongoing. Giuliani went to Ukraine with his subcontractors / henchmen to try to collect dirt on Hunter Biden and get Ukrainian officials to smear the Bidens on the record. Along the way, they nearly got a US ambassador killed. He also began to tell Fox News, Twitter users and journalists of his project while it was in-progress. It’s no wonder it led to Trump’s impeachment. It was in plain sight. He even went to Ukraine late in the impeachment proceedings. It was also around this time that Giuliani finalized his divorce from Judith Nathan and made himself a new base at The Mark Hotel on the Upper East Side.
Despite a sharp drop in income, he has not relinquished his luxurious lifestyle. He reportedly drinks day and night. Throughout COVID-19 pandemic, he has been seen at the bar, maskless, inside the hotel. By this time last year, he was giving bizarre interviews from the hotel. He’s reportedly easy to find at the Mark and is available to rant to any journalist who is willing to endure him.
He was maskless again at his extraordinary press conference yesterday. It made his November 7 event look like a minor gaffe. It was off the rails, with wild conspiracy theories and “constitutional law attorney” Jenna Ellis insulting a reporter who dared ask for any evidence of one of the wild conspiracies they tossed into the public sphere. And we need to confront that shit. Specifically, the charge that vote counting machines were programmed to reduce a set percentage of votes for Trump across all counties, giving Biden a handicap, is insane. They also claimed that late-night reporting of mail-in ballots was actually a dump of manufactured, fraudulent ballots, organized by Democrats in a desperate attempt to to maintain Biden’s lead, because Democrats didn’t program the counting machines to change a high enough percentage of Trump votes. That is even more insane. And yet, here we are, with close to half the nation believing just that - that this election was stolen through a vast Democratic conspiracy that spanned cities, towns, counties and states.
The hair dye dripping down Guiliani's face was an unnecessary but near perfect metaphor for this demented attempt to overturn a democratic election. "America's Mayor", who may be suffering from severe alcohol addiction, is clearly unhinged, and his "legal team" looks like the cast from a Monty Python sketch. Are we really supposed to believe that Hugo Chavez, Venezuelan dictator, dead for more than seven years, funded the installation of thousands of voting machines which could change Trump votes to Biden votes through some mysterious "algorithm,” which is really just described in the Pennsylvania complaint as a percentage cut? Are we really supposed to believe that George Soros and Antifa have engineered a massive theft of the votes that would have delivered a massive landslide for Trump?
I think the republic has been permanently poisoned by Trump’s desperate attempt to delay the Biden transition. But here’s something else I started to think a year ago when Rudy gave that unhinged interview to New York Magazine: Rudy is going to wind up dead soon. And it’s sad because no one has bothered to try to save him. Doesn’t he have any friends?
He’s going to be found cold and lifeless in his hotel room. His drinking will eventually finish himself off. Rudy Giuliani doesn’t have long to live. His obituaries are not going to be flattering. His legacy is long destroyed. His mind is gone. His heart and liver aren’t far behind.
Who will Donald Trump turn to for legal assistance then? Will Trump even be in the country by then?
Uncle Tim contributed to this post.