From heroism to perdition. From splendor to neglect. From scourge of mobsters to mobster in the highest degree. Rudy Giuliani, fearsome prosecutor and vigilante before beloved and glorious mayor in 9/11 New York, is now the most important, but also the most pathetic, co-defendant in the case of the state of Georgia against Donald Trump and the his 18 colleagues in 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 charged with 13 criminal counts of extortion, threats and lying in order to overthrow that electoral defeat in the southern state.
Giuliani, 79, is the most resounding embodiment of the decline of politics in the United States; perhaps too blunt and raw to support with credibility a script like those of the two series that now, as if their legal problems and disrepute were not enough, remember the role he had as a lawyer for the Purdue Pharma company: the one that produced and sold millions of OxyContin (oxycodone) pills that, 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 harrowing; It will be seen if it is also a penalty, finally. The starting point was high. After his brilliant 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, designated as “Mayor of the United States”, Giuliani he was more popular than Pope John Paul II, if nothing else, in the US, according to pollster Gallup. That year, the sad 2001, Time magazine chose him as personality of the year.
Still clothed with this aura of champion of the goodness of America, Giuliani embarked on his great political flight in 2008, when he aspired to the presidential elections from the not inconsiderable position of favorite among the Republican candidates. And suddenly, because of a campaign so expensive and catastrophic that it forced him to retire and left him $3.6 million in debt, his superhero cape was suddenly torn. The ex-prosecutor crashed to the ground. But his descent was not over.
After the electoral fiasco, Giuliani found something more than consolation in the person of Donald Trump, his biggest admirer since the days of 11-S. The tycoon and politician sheltered him for several weeks in a cabin inside his club and residential complex in Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, the same place where twelve years later the former president would hide hundreds of illegally transferred classified documents from the White House, an action that today forms the basis of one of the four criminal charges against him.
In those weeks after the 2008 debacle, the failed lawyer and politician was depressed by the vertigo of his sudden irrelevance. He drank more than he should and even had an accident as a result of his staggering, according to accounts published by The New York Times and testimonies of people close to him for a book by journalist Andrew Kirtzman, including some terrifying revelations of his wife at the time, Judith Nathan. But everything happened in private, at Mar-a-Lago: “We moved there and Donald kept our secret,” Nathan would explain.
Giuliani made up for Trump years later, beginning in the 2016 presidential campaign. He did so in an often exaggerated manner and with eccentric and strange 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 then, already from the position of a lawyer, as the instigator of accusations against Joe Biden for which Giuliani came to be investigated by prosecutors Manhattan Feds.
A few days before the 2020 election, Giuliani appeared in a more than awkward scene from the film Borat: Subsequent Moviefilm, for which he had been recorded cheating on him. The lawyer appeared lying on the bed of a hotel room with his hand in his pants in front of a young actress who he thought was a journalist. His subsequent explanations, to say that he was simply tucking in his shirt, did nothing to mend the embarrassment, and even Trump stepped in to limit the damage.
When the ultra leader lost the presidential elections, Giuliani made every effort to denounce the alleged electoral fraud. He did so, among other things, 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 of 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 call against “massive” cheating while copious streams of hair dye fell from his sideburns and smeared his face .
Beyond the ridiculousness he did in the two performances, the “manifestly false and misleading” statements he made about the alleged electoral fraud cost him his license as a lawyer, by the judgment of a New York court in 2021.
And now the same claims, along with his acts of intimidation of officials and election workers in Georgia to alter the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, could cost him prison… And it is not ruled out that Trump will accompany him on this trip , again.
