Rudy, from lawman to lawbreaker
The man formerly known as the mayor who saved New York City from an epidemic of murder and violent crime, who once upon a time Oprah Winfrey dubbed “America’s Mayor” for seeing us through some of our darkest days, continues to cement himself as a disgrace, as sticker scum that won’t come off the feet of New York no matter how hard we scrape.
That’s Rudy Giuliani, already charged in Georgia for plotting to overturn the outcome of the 2020 elections, and now indicted on similar charges by an Arizona grand jury along with 17 other Donald Trump allies.
Giuliani’s name may be blacked out in the 58page indictment unsealed last week, but there’s no doubt he’s one of a group of lowlifes who “schemed to prevent the lawful transfer of the presidency to keep Unindicted Coconspirator 1” — that’s Donald J. Trump — “in office against the will of Arizona’s voters.”
How? By helping orchestrate a scheme for their dear leader to stay in office despite getting fewer popular votes in key swing states (and far far fewer electoral votes overall) than Joe Biden. Put in lay terms, democracy in these United States is a treasure to protect and defend, not a toy to be played with by people desperate to cling to power.
When all the legitimate votes were counted in Arizona, those for Biden totaled 1,672,143, and for Trump, 1,661,686. That’s a squeaker, but a margin of 10,457 is still a winning margin — and throwing junk theories against the wall to insist votes were fabricated or stolen doesn’t change one whit. The gang recruited 11 fake electors who would cast 11 electoral votes for Trump, votes that belonged rightfully to Biden. On Jan. 6, 2021, in the speech that lit the fuse of the mob that stormed the Capitol, Trump claimed “over 36,000 ballots were illegally cast by non-citizens” in Arizona. Those fever dreams were centered on Maricopa County, where the most Arizonans live — but a Republican-backed “full forensic audit” of that county’s results wound up with numbers nearly identical to the official results.
“Truth is truth, numbers are numbers,” said Republican Senate President Karen Fann after the review — which hilariously yielded 99 additional votes for Biden and 261 fewer for Trump.
Indeed, Trump’s own campaign manager, Bill Stepien, called the former president’s insistence that he got more votes in Arizona a “wild claim” that “on its face didn’t seem, you know, realistic or possible to me,” adding that “the reality of that was not illegal citizens voting in the election” but rather that the votes were cast by “people who were eligible to vote.”
When he led New York City, Rudy Giuliani styled himself as the grounded deliverer of hard truths, opposed to a coddled political establishment that too often reached for easy, reflexive left-wing political answers. Sometimes that was true, sometimes not. (In those days, Donald Trump was just a bloaviating, self-promoting real estate scion.)
Under the sway of now former President Trump, Giuliani — a man who used to be proud — has become a self-flagellating toady, and a man who used to pride himself on seeing reality clearly has become a wholesale hallucinator.
“How the mighty have fallen,” quoth the Bible. But Rudy’s done much more than fallen. He’s buried himself under heaps of dirt and dung.