NEW YORK: Hair coloring that melts on the sides of his face as he declared long-dead Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez caused the president Donald trumpThe electoral defeat made one thing clear: Rudy giuliani He is no longer the “mayor of the United States.”
The praise Giuliani earned for his quiet strength in leading New York City after the September 11, 2001 attacks has been dissolved into a series of increasingly bizarre claims that Democrats, the media, and, yes , the late Venezuelan dictator, had stolen re-election from Trump.
His press conference Thursday, pushing election conspiracy theories without any evidence, was Giuliani’s latest bold and timid display on behalf of Trump, who lost the Nov.3 election to Democrats. Joe biden but he refuses to admit defeat.
“We cannot allow these criminals, because that’s what they are, to steal an election from the American people. They elected Donald Trump. They did not elect Joe Biden,” Giuliani said, ignoring Biden’s nearly six million vote margin over Trump. .
Maryland Republican Gov. Larry Hogan called the press conference a “train wreck.”
And Chris Krebs, the US election security chief recently fired by Trump, called it “the most dangerous 1 hour and 45 minutes of television in US history. And possibly the craziest.”
According to this week’s New York Times, Giuliani had asked to be paid $ 20,000 a day for his performances on Trump’s behalf, although the same report said it was unclear how much compensation he would ultimately receive.
Money aside, Robert Polner, editor of a book on Giuliani, says the once-feared federal prosecutor and then mayor of New York has always been a “restless political opportunist” for whom credibility was not a priority.
The 9/11 attacks prepared Giuliani for bigger things, and one writer compared his response to Winston Churchill.
But that could have been Giuliani’s best moment.
He set his sights on a run for the White House in 2008, but a questionable primary strategy failed, as did his reliance on his 9/11 credentials without developing a broader platform.
“There are only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and September 11,” said Biden, who was seeking the Democratic presidential nomination that year.
The 2008 defeat left him adrift, but eventually his friend and political ally in New York, Trump, offered him a way forward.
“Giuliani saw a path to power as a result of his friendship with Trump, and he never looked back,” Polner said.
His energy and willingness to defend Trump in anything made him essential.
When an embarrassing tape threatened to wipe out Trump’s chances in 2016, Giuliani ran a marathon of television interviews to explain it, effectively neutralizing the problem.
After the election, Trump did not reward his desire to be named secretary of state, but Giuliani hardly suffered.
Made millions of dollars in countries and companies that needed a lobbyist with a direct line to Oval Office.
In early 2018, the president hired him to help fight the Mueller investigation.
Giuliani became a constant television presence defending the president and accusing investigators and the media of corruption and prejudice, with a Trump-like showmanship.
Tirelessly, he often spoke so much that he contradicted what he said moments before or, as in August 2018 on NBC, defended the president with notable statements such as “The truth is not true.”
But Giuliani’s efforts also caused problems.
Anticipating Biden running against Trump in 2020, in late 2018 Giuliani led an effort to find dirt on the Democrat and his son, who had done business in Ukraine.
Based on what Giuliani claimed to have found, Trump froze aid to Ukraine and told the country’s president to turn over alleged evidence of Biden’s corruption.
That illegal act led to Trump becoming the third president in history to be indicted.
The effort to reverse Trump’s clear electoral defeat appears to be Giuliani’s most sisyphus challenge.
A briefing that he called a major press event after the vote was mercilessly mocked when it emerged that the location was not the luxurious Four Seasons hotel in Philadelphia, as Trump tweeted, but a suburban garden center between a crematorium and a bookstore for adults. Total Four Seasons Landscaping.
To heap ignominy on the charade, the press conference was held at the time when US news networks announced that Trump had lost the election after four days of counting the votes.
Several of Giuliani’s cases have been dropped or dismissed as unfounded. In a court appearance this week, he continued to denounce electoral fraud until the judge forced him to admit that the case in question was not related to the fraud.
In his press conference Thursday, he claimed to have some evidence of electoral crimes, but did not present it.
Some of the other evidence he offered, alleged witness statements, were quickly disproved by the media.
But that didn’t stop him.
“We have enough evidence without that to overturn this election. We do have it from the affidavits of American citizens, but that is a national security issue that we are talking about now,” he said.
“If that’s not a headline tomorrow, then you don’t know what a headline is.”
.
