By Gail Collins
Opinion Columnist
- Jan. 23, 2019
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Rudy Giuliani, a little off balance, at the White House in May.CreditCreditDoug Mills/The New York Times
There are a lot of theories about why Rudy Giuliani is still Donald Trump’s lawyer. Maybe his crazed, contradictory rantings are a canny plot to confuse the public about what’s actually going on with the president’s Russia-connection scandal.
Or maybe the fact that Giuliani works for free is more attractive than the fact that he does a dreadful job.
Or maybe it’s just that he is the one person who makes Trump look good.
Sure, both of them contradict themselves every five minutes. But Trump never tries to argue that he can’t be wrong because he’s such a great lawyer.
Both men have been married three times, with a messy history when it comes to adultery, but Trump seems to have calmed down with age. Giuliani is 74, and he’s involved in divorce proceedings with his last wife, Judith Nathan, who claims very vigorously that he’s been running around.
told New York magazine.
People wondered whether the “nurse” thing was a reference to the fact that Rudy likes to drink. He also smokes — Nathan claimed that her almost-ex had spent about $12,000 over five months in cigars alone.
Trump doesn’t use alcohol or tobacco. See, he’s looking better. Sort of.
Other presidents who’ve gotten in trouble have hired private lawyers, but has there ever been anything quite like this? On Sunday Giuliani quoted his own client as saying that discussions with the Russians over a Trump Moscow hotel were “going on from the day I announced to the day I won.” Take it easy, Mueller investigators. Rudy seems to be doing your job for you.
Then — retraction time! On Monday Giuliani said everything he told reporters on Sunday was “hypothetical.” And anyway, nothing matters as long as you can’t be convicted for it. (“My client didn’t do it, and even if he did it, it’s not a crime.”) The man is certainly a master of the low bar. “Paying $130,000 to Stormy whatever and paying $130,000 to the other one is not a crime,” he said during Trump’s shut-up-the-squeezes period.
We pause here to briefly note that the Stormy Daniels payoff was delivered by Trump attorney Michael Cohen. Does this president have great taste in lawyers or what?
Watch Giuliani on TV and you see a man being devoured by egomania. Lawyers are supposed to serve as a screen between their clients and the outside world. If said client is being accused of a crime, their mission is to make the whole matter sound as boring as humanly possible.
It’s no problem for us that Trump picked an attorney who’s so wildly hungry for attention that he can’t follow the rules. Really, it’s great that we’re getting to hear so much unfiltered information. The depressing part is that this is just one more piece of evidence that Donald Trump surrounds himself with people who have both terrible judgment and terrible aptitude for the jobs they’re supposed to be doing.
Whatever shred of credibility Giuliani still retains is connected to his role as mayor on Sept. 11, when the whole world saw him walking through the dust of the World Trade Center collapse. He needed to get uptown since the city’s emergency management center had been destroyed by the blast. That’s because Giuliani had it located in the W.T.C. — a place that had been targeted for bombing by terrorists in the past — despite vigorous objections from his security advisers. He just sort of wanted it close to City Hall.
Later, the mayor would take dignitaries to the disaster site, sometimes shielded from the deadly asbestos floating through the air by a face mask. And, it appeared, totally ignoring the fact that most of the workmen had no protection whatsoever.
Giuliani had already begun to evolve from competent city official to hapless big-time political candidate before the bombing occurred. He tried to run for Senate against Hillary Clinton in what was undoubtedly one of the most disaster-ridden campaigns in history. That was the time he held a press conference to announce he was leaving his wife, without mentioning the matter to the spouse in question.
His unharnessed libido has been part of his story ever since. Last summer, after Giuliani bragged to a reporter about his new girlfriend, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was forced to declare that she was “not today or tomorrow or at any point ever going to comment on Rudy Giuliani’s love life.”
And the beat goes on. During his parade of super-strange comments over the last week, he volunteered that he’s afraid “it will be on my gravestone: ‘Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump.’”
“Somehow I don’t think that will be it,” he added. “But if it is, so what do I care? I’ll be dead.”
Once again we ask ourselves: What kind of a lawyer says stuff like that? What we have here is not a skilled strategist trying to find the best way to defend his client, but just another member of the nation’s ever-growing pack of celebrities who can’t shut up.
Another one of them, of course, got himself elected president. At least Rudy doesn’t tweet as much.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/...l?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
