From heroism to perdition. From splendor to shabby. From gangster hammer to high grade gangster. Rudy Giuliani, fearsome prosecutor and vigilante before beloved and glorious mayor in New York on 9/11, is now the most important co-defendant, but also the most pathetic, in the case of the state of Georgia against Donald Trump and his 18 cronies of the “criminal enterprise” that they all set up to falsify the results of the 2020 presidential elections. Like his idolized boss and client, he is accused of 13 criminal counts for extorting, threatening and lying with the purpose of reversing that electoral defeat in the southern state.
Giuliani, 79, is the most emphatic embodiment of the decline of politics in the United States; perhaps too blunt and crude to credibly support a script like those of the two series that now, as if his judicial problems and his discredit were not enough, recall the role he had as a lawyer for the Purdue Pharma company: the one that launched and sold millions of OxyContin (oxycodone) pills which, according to Dopesick and Lethal Medicine accounts, would have caused 300,000 overdose deaths in the US.
Giuliani’s plummet from glory to hell is tragic and painful; he will see if he also criminal finally. The starting point was high. After his lucid performance as a leader who knew how to catalyze the best instincts of solidarity and survival of his fellow citizens in the lowest moments, to the point of being informally but unanimously appointed as “mayor of the United States”, Giuliani was more popular than the pope. John Paul II, at least in the US, according to the Gallup pollster. That year, the sad 2001, Time magazine chose him as personality of the year.
Still dressed in that aura of a champion of all that is good in America, Giuliani began his great political flight in 2008, when he ran for president from the not inconsiderable position of favorite among the Republican candidates. And suddenly, because of a campaign that was as expensive as it was catastrophic and forced him to retire and left him in debt of 3.6 million dollars, his superhero cape suddenly broke. The ex-prosecutor fell face down on the ground. But his descent was not over.
After the election fiasco, Giuliani found more than solace in the person of Donald Trump, his biggest fan since the days of 9/11. The tycoon and politician gave him refuge for several weeks in a small house inside his club and residential complex in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, the same place where 12 years later the former president would hide hundreds of classified documents illegally transferred from the Casa Blanca, action that today grounds one of the four criminal charges against him.
In those weeks after the 2008 debacle, the failed jurist and politician found himself depressed by the vertigo of his sudden irrelevance. He drank too much and even suffered accidents as a result of his staggering, according to accounts published in The New York Times and testimonies from people close to him for a book by journalist Andrew Kirtzman, including some terrible revelations from his wife at the time, Judith. Nathan. But everything happened in private, inside Mar-a-Lago: “We moved there, and Donald kept our secret,” Nathan would say.
Giuliani repaid Trump years later, beginning in the 2016 presidential campaign. He did so in often exaggerated ways and with bizarre, eccentric behavior that raised questions about his status; first as a vehement defender of the leader in the face of inquiries about Russian interference in the elections, and later, already from the position of lawyer, as instigator of accusations against Joe Biden for which Giuliani came to be investigated by federal prosecutors in Manhattan .
A few days before the 2020 election, Giuliani appeared in a more than embarrassing scene in Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, for which he had been filmed under duress. The lawyer was shown lying on the bed of a hotel room, reaching into his pants in front of a young actress who he thought was a journalist. Further explanations from him that he was merely tucking in his shirt were not enough to repair the embarrassment, and even Trump stepped in to limit the damage.
When the ultra leader lost the presidential elections, Giuliani was hoarse in denouncing the alleged electoral fraud. He did it, among other moments, in two surreal press conferences: one in Philadelphia on November 7, four days after the vote, in the parking lot of a landscaping company located in front of a sex shop and next to a crematorium; the other, at the headquarters of the Republican National Committee in Washington, on the 19th of the same month, when he insisted on his outcry against a “massive” tongo while large streams of his hair dye fell through his sideburns and on his face. they drenched the face.
Beyond the ridicule that he made in both proceedings, the “manifestly false and misleading” statements that he made in them about the alleged pufo cost him his license as a lawyer, by ruling of a New York court in 2021. And now the same statements, together with his acts of intimidation of Georgia electoral officials and employees to alter the result of the 2020 presidential elections, they can cost him jail… Without it being ruled out that Trump will accompany him on the trip, once again.
