What do Trump's 'Muslim ban,' Ukraine, and Biden smear campaigns have in common? Giuliani.
Giuliani encourages Trump's self-destructive habits, buys into conspiracies, and can't keep a secret. What a gift.
By Hayes Brown
I believe this country owes a deep debt of gratitude to the former mayor of New York City, Rudolph W. Giuliani. This feels counterintuitive even as I write it, but I think that we should all take a moment in this turbulent time to be thankful for the man who has given us so much — admittedly, often without realizing it.
Because, for all his misguided blunders and transparent ill intentions, Giuliani has consistently encouraged some of President Donald Trump's most self-destructive habits. He has been the media's best source for Trump's worst behavior. He is Trump's worst enemy in the form of a close friend and legal counsel.
I truly believe that the outgoing administration, with all of its outrages and crises, would have been even more of a nightmare, and would have wrought even more destruction, without Giuliani's helping hand guiding Trump through it all. Giuliani has encouraged and inflamed some of Trump's most self-defeating instincts and failures. And like an archetypal Bond villain who's been pumped full of truth serum, he's appeared completely unable to stop himself from revealing the grand strategy at work to anyone who asks.
Giuliani has been described as a proto-Trump in a lot of ways, from his love of attention and cameras to his willingness to make money no matter how shady the income stream. After he endorsed Trump in 2016, he was gunning to become secretary of state when those shady income streams kneecapped him, forcing him to withdraw his bid. Instead, he got a sinecure position as cybersecurity adviser at the White House that we have never spoken of again, except for when it was very funny.
Giuliani's real skill came into focus less than 10 days into the Trump administration, when he went on Fox News to speak with host Jeanine Pirro about the "Muslim ban" that Trump had signed. He seemed very happy to tell Pirro the whole backstory and why the executive order wasn't really a racist attack on Muslims.
"I'll tell you the whole history of it," Giuliani said. "So when he first announced it, he said, 'Muslim ban.' He called me up. He said: 'Put a commission together. Show me the right way to do it legally.'
"And what we did was, we focused on, instead of religion, danger — the areas of the world that create danger for us," Rudy continued, seemingly unaware how flimsy and blatantly discriminatory his argument was. The administration wound up having to scrap Rudy's standards twice over before the Supreme Court finally gave the thumbs-up to Trump's immigration restrictions.
Giuliani withdrew for a while after that, looking for new clients to raise cash from, only to emerge again during the Mueller investigation. This was Giuliani at his peak, in that he didn't actually do much legal work, it seems. Instead, he went on television and said what felt like whatever popped into his brain at any given moment, much like his client. He reportedly did the same off camera — discretion has never been part of the Giuliani Guarantee, trademark pending. Behind the scenes, he and Trump were looking for ways to discredit Robert Mueller, which led them to Ukraine.
If it weren't for Giuliani, I don't see how this whole thing could have happened. He's the one who fed Trump conspiracies about the mythical CrowdStrike server that was allegedly hidden in Ukraine. He's the one who set up the pressure campaign on the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovich, and got her fired. He's the one who got Ukraine's prosecutor-general to smear the Bidens, buying their self-serving lies hook, line and sinker.
READ MORE: What do Trump's 'Muslim ban,' Ukraine, and Biden smear campaigns have in common? Giuliani.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/what-do-trum...
Posted By: Dea. Ron Gray Sr.
Thursday, November 26th 2020 at 4:41PM
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