Dear Commons Community,
Jeffrey Toobin currently a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993 and a legal analyst for CNN, has an article entitled How Rudy Giuliani Turned Into Trump’s Clown? It is a lengthy, highly insightful send-up of Giuliani with regard to his relationship with Donald Trump and his current role as a member of Trump’s legal team in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Toobin reviews Giuliani’s time as a prosecutor, as mayor, and as the face of America’s response to 9/11. Toobin is most critical in his analysis of Giuliani’s current position as Trump spokesperson. Here are several excerpts;
“Since joining Trump’s team, Giuliani has greeted every new development as a vindication, even when he’s had to bend and warp the evidence in front of him. Like Trump, he characterizes the Mueller probe as a “witch hunt” and the prosecutors as “thugs.” He has, in effect, become the legal auxiliary to Trump’s Twitter feed, peddling the same chaotic mixture of non sequiturs, exaggerations, half-truths, and falsehoods. Giuliani, like the President, is not seeking converts but comforting the converted.
This has come at considerable cost to his reputation. As a prosecutor, Giuliani was the sheriff of Wall Street and the bane of organized crime. As mayor, he was the law-and-order leader who kicked “squeegee men” off the streets of New York. Now he’s a talking head spouting nonsense on cable news. But this version of Giuliani isn’t new; Trump has merely tapped into tendencies that have been evident all along. Trump learned about law and politics from his mentor Roy Cohn, the notorious sidekick to Joseph McCarthy who, as a lawyer in New York, became a legendary brawler and used the media to bash adversaries. In the early months of his Presidency, as Mueller’s investigation was getting under way, Trump is said to have raged, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” In Giuliani, the President has found him….”
“…Giuliani’s animus toward Mueller precipitated what may be his most notorious recent gaffe. He has objected to the interview by saying that the President’s words may conflict with those of other witnesses, leading Mueller to conclude that Trump is lying—what Giuliani calls a “perjury trap.” This is a contrived objection, since any reasonable prosecutor would look at a range of evidence, especially corroborating witnesses and documents. In an August 19th interview on “Meet the Press,” the host, Chuck Todd, asked Giuliani whether a perjury trap could even exist, since a witness who told the truth couldn’t be trapped. Giuliani responded, “When you tell me that he should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well, that’s so silly, because it’s somebody’s version of the truth. Not the truth.”
Todd responded, “Truth is truth.”
“No, it isn’t truth,” Giuliani said. “Truth isn’t truth.”
Giuliani later claimed that he was trying to say that truth can be subjective, especially when there are conflicting versions of events, but at this point his performance suggests that he may not believe the concept of truth is even real….
….The problem for Giuliani is that his loyalty may not be reciprocated. Since Trump became President, his closest advisers have been humiliated (Tillerson, Priebus), disgraced (Sean Spicer, Bannon), prosecuted (Flynn, Rick Gates), or all of the above (Manafort). At one point, I asked Giuliani whether he worried about how this chapter of his life would affect his legacy.
“I don’t care about my legacy,” he told me. “I’ll be dead.”
Giuliani may be a clown but a dangerous one like Tonio in Pagliacci.
Tony
