Everything Donald Trump touches turns to shit.
I honestly don’t know if Rudy Giuliani had it in him to be a great man. After all, I is, was and always will be a Republican who was a fairly authoritarian mayor of New York City.
But on Sept. 11, 2001, when the planes hit the Twin Towers, the mayor definitely stepped up and had a few days of greatness.
Gov. George Pataki, Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. Hillary Clinton on Sept. 12, 2001
I will never forget his answer when he was asked what he thought the death toll from the terrorist attack would be.
“Almost too much to bear,” he said.
For a short time, at least, he was America’s Mayor.
He looked great in comparison to President George W. Bush, who sat in a Florida classroom with a frozen look on his face listening to a second grader read “The Pet Goat.” Or Vice President Dick Cheney, in hiding at an “undisclosed location” that turned out to be the White House bunker where Trump hid from protesters nearly two decades later.
No, Giuiiani was out there … in a good way.
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat and a Vietnam veteran who won the Medal of Honor for his service, was a member of the commission that studied the 911 attacks. He strongly praised Giuliani for his performance.
“Trust me, the range of possibilities for leaders is quite extreme: Some panic, some get paralyzed,” Kerrey said. “Giuliani was brave and reassuring, and you can’t subtract that from his résumé. Giuliani did what the president didn’t do. He went to all those funerals. And that grieving got us back to normal.”
If Giuliani had died in 2002, that’s how he would be remembered.
But many people live too long and their final chapters detract from the overall story. Starting with the 2020 presidential election and its aftermath, Giuliani became a joke … and a fairly unfunny one at that.
Whether it was the press conference at the gardening shop next to the adult bookstore or the hair dye running down his cheeks in the hot TV lights, Giuliani had gone from America’s Mayor to America’s Clown.
Did he hit rock bottom last year when he lost a $148 million judgment for slandering Georgia election workers?
Maybe financially, but with Trump there really is no bottom too far to fall. On his radio show Wednesday, he actually said Trump and his Trumpanzees had nothing to do with the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
“You know, January 6th, they had a damn Hollywood producer doing it, and they snowed everybody on the left, and boy, they got a lot of our people pissing in their pants. And since I had the inside information at 5 o’clock, you can’t believe how my respect level for them went down.
“Boom. Man, I’m glad I’m not in a foxhole with them. Whoa, do they get scared fast.
“You’re going to find out that January 6th was a setup just like Russian collusion, just like the hard drive, and just like the stolen election, and just like what they’re doing right now, spacing four trials in one year.”
Poor Rudy.