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When the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, read out the details of her historic indictment of Donald Trump and 17 others this week, there was a distinct moment of drama as we waited to hear who would have the dubious honour of being named right after the former president: “Rudolph William Louis Giuliani …”
Rudy Giuliani, of course, was once a powerful law-enforcement official himself. For years he was a US attorney in Manhattan, fearlessly going up against mafia figures and Wall Street bad guys. Then he was the two-term mayor of New York City. He was heralded by Oprah Winfrey as “America’s mayor” after he responded to the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, with sobriety and calm. He was for a time the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the 2008 US presidential election.
Trump has even turned on Rudy Giuliani, his personal attorney.Credit: Bloomberg
These days, by contrast, he sinks from one low to another. Two weeks ago he was “Co-conspirator No. 1” in the federal indictment of Trump for working to overthrow the results of the 2020 election. Legal experts on both sides say, given the allegations in the indictment, Giuliani is likely to be the subject of a formal prosecution in the matter at some point.
Anyone who holds the reins of a sprawling mess like NYC for eight years is not an insignificant person. But it must be said that, absent September 11, Giuliani’s career would have been much different. He’d have worn out his welcome in New York by the end of his second term; his contempt for racial minorities was plain, and he embarked on a crusade against a museum that showed art he didn’t like.
Many New Yorkers watched with disbelief as the terrorist strikes turned him from a crank being shown the door into a hero. Giuliani collected an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth – and began to cash in, suddenly styling himself an international security and cyber expert. He made millions from scummy sources, such as the maker of the notorious drug Oxycontin. Reporting later revealed he worked with shadowy companies with connections to Vladimir Putin.
In 2016, Giuliani began promoting Trump’s first presidential campaign; his rhetoric about Hillary Clinton became extreme. Now we can see this was a harbinger of a new vulgarity and irresponsibility in US politics. Giuliani stood by Trump through scandals – and learned that public toadying to Trump brought him into the inner circle. After the election, Giuliani ended up billing himself as the president’s “personal lawyer”, although he said he wasn’t getting paid. Giuliani spoke at that fateful rally before the attack on the US Capitol, urging the crowd towards a “trial by combat”.
In the years since the election he has become the biggest punchline in American political life, which, in this golden age of political poltroons, is saying something. There was the now-infamous Four Seasons press conference in Philadelphia, held not at a swanky downtown hotel but at a nondescript suburban landscaping business tucked in between a crematorium and a porn store. Giuliani’s first witness about supposed election tampering in Pennsylvania: a convicted sex-offender from … the neighbouring state of New Jersey.
A few days after the Four Seasons fiasco, in Washington, he faced a new disaster. As he babbled conspiracy theories to reporters, hair dye began running off his scalp down the side of his face. This was widely cited as a vivid metaphor for the brain cells Giuliani seemed to be losing daily.
Dye-hard Trump supporter … Rudy Giuliani during a news conference at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington in November 2020.Credit: AP
Today Giuliani’s professional life is a mess, and he is pleading poverty. He is being sued for defamation by two election workers in Georgia whom he targeted with charges of election malfeasance, with no evidence. Among other claims, Giuliani said they were passing computer thumb drives “like heroin”. (The women are African-American; it is a racist trope on the right in the US to associate people of colour with drugs.) His court filings in the case have drawn derision from the judge.
A sexual harassment lawsuit brought against Giuliani in New York contains transcripts of recordings featuring him delivering salacious comments and anti-Semitic rants. Local bar associations have taken notice of his many untrue and outlandish remarks in court, and his license to practise law has been suspended in both New York and Washington DC.
Back in the Watergate days, the cronies around Richard Nixon had, let’s not forget, put him in the White House and had run the country for five years before everything fell apart. Trump’s brain trust is very different, a mix of political non-entities, toadies and nutballs (even Trump has called some of his lawyers crazy, according to one of the indictments). And most of them, we now see, slipped easily into the role of would-be traitor.
Rudy Giuliani, the debauched and disgraced hero, will forever be first among them.
Bill Wyman is a former arts editor and assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.
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