Four years ago, Rudy Giuliani took the stage at the Republican National Convention to deliver a terrifying monologue about how his friend Donald Trump would usher in a new era of law and order and end the racial struggle through political assassination of Black men.
Four years later, Giuliani returned to the RNC. He is still shy. And this time he monologues about how an unusual wave of protests, civil strife, and anger over yet another round of police shootings is why we should re-elect Trump.
Claiming that “my city is in shock” over an increase in shootings since the George Floyd protests began and with “a self-described Progressive Democrat” in the lead (shootings in New York City are up sharply this year, though still well below the levels who they were when Giuliani left office after 2001), Trump’s lawyer Joe Biden called a “Trojan horse” after shouting at the cameras: “Let Democrats not do to America what they did to New York! “
Despite the references in Giuliani’s speech Thursday night to rising urban crime rates and attacks on Democratic mayors, the “mayor of America” speech, as Oprah Winfrey considered it after 9/11, had little to do with cities and everything to do with it launching a breadth in the battle of the suburbs.
Polls show suburban women and science in college leave Trump behind and move to Biden. The president has responded on Twitter with dog whistles about affordable housing that bring suburban minorities and housewives who fear that low-income families will “enter” their communities.
Trump campaign surrogates have tried to seize the story by pointing out horrific images of cities on fire and warning that they are a sign of an America under Biden – while forgetting to recognize that it is the current one under Trump.
The unspoken subtext of Giuliani’s speech sought to resolve that contradiction: Trump cannot be held responsible for what happens in Democratic cities and minority neighborhoods because he is not the president of cities and Black Americans; he is your president, the president of white suburbs.
“It is clear that a vote for Biden and the Democrats runs the risk of bringing this lawlessness to your city, town or suburb,” Giuliani warned.
He taps on the names of innocents who have been murdered in recent months – 4-year-old LeGen Taliferro in Kansas City, 17-year-old basketball player Brandon Hendricks in the Bronx days after graduating from high school and succeeding with only brief mention , and 1-year-old Davell Gardner, Jr. in Brooklyn, “before declaring that” For President Trump, and for us Republicans, all Black Lives Matter and the lives of LaGen, Brandon and Davell are for us. All life matters to us. ”
A few sentences later, he managed to use those names to blame Barack Obama and Biden, declaring that ‘It has been like this for decades and it is constantly controlled by Democrats. In fact, shamefully Obama and Biden have done absolutely nothing to stop the massacre. I think these Black lives “- still referring to people who were assassinated this year, during the Trump presidency -” did nothing for them. “
Perhaps not coincidentally, Biden was the candidate who baked through what was left of Giuliani’s aura when both men were running for president early in the 2008 campaign. The soon-to-be vice president, famously a former Republican foreman, said that “there are only three things he needs to do … a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11.”
Speaking directly to Pat Lynch, the leader of the NYPD’s largest union, who signed into a presidential race for the first time this year, he stated that “you will not be safe in Joe Biden’s America,” Giuliani again reached in subtext to criticize the Democratic critics nominated.
The former mayor had spent the run-up to the convention in an amateur gerontology campaign in an attempt to suggest Biden was senile and on Thursday re-enacted his diagnosis, with more subtlety. Biden, Giuliani said, was “a obviously defective candidate” who was unable to leave his basement.
The role of driving test balloons in bad taste on behalf of the candidate was once reserved for another Trump adviser, Roger Stone. But since then, Giuliani stepped into the role with enthusiasm.
Giuliani’s most cherished test balloon was remarkably absent from his speech and the convention in general. Trump’s personal lawyer spent much of 2019 across Ukraine looking for filth that Hunter Biden could put in the intersection of a foreign prosecutor and his father during a safe removal from the White House.
Even for a campaign that is still looking for offensive lines that remain nominated for the Democratic nominee, no one – not even Rudy – seems to feel that the story of Ukraine was worth broadcasting. Trump’s accusation seems to be the only one Giuliani received for his attempt to find what many once thought would be a political death knell for Biden.
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