Even If Giuliani Is Really Working For Free, Trump Is Overpaying Him

Rudy Giuliani by Nancy Ohanian

After minor TRUMP! characters, Lev and Igor, took center stage-- by being arrested by the FBI as they were trying to flee the country last week-- Trump lied to the media, saying he doesn't know them and telling the reporters to go ask Rudy. Trump knows them well and has taken immense sums in bribes from them. The 'go ask Rudy' directive was one of his typical tactics of throwing an underling under the bus to get the heat off himself. He could have as easily said 'go ask Mike' (either Pompeo or Pence) or-- in an emergency-- 'go ask Don, Jr.'. Since he spends so much time watching TV, he could have easily said 'go ask Alice' too.

Yesterday White House reporters were all giggling about how Trump had told them he doesn't know if Giuliani, an old crony going back decades, is still his personal attorney. "Well, I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to Rudy. I spoke to him yesterday briefly. He’s a very good attorney, and he has been my attorney, and he has been my attorney. Yeah, sure." Rudy insists he still works for Trump, whatever that means. Normally-- on TRUMP!-- this sounds like an ax is about to be dropped but it's Rudy so... probably not. That's not to say that other characters want him off the island. Anita Kumar and Darren Samuelsohn reported that "for weeks, prominent Republican advisers have been privately imploring" Señor Trumpanzee to fire Rudy "after a barrage of inconsistent, combative and occasionally cringe-inducing media interviews."

That would presumably be Ivanka and Jared? Who else would tell Trump to get rid of Giuliani, even if anyone sane would have?

Trump remains linked to Giuliani, who was initially hired to help fend of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigators, but who now may have pulled the president into another investigation-- one that might lead to impeachment. While the president has long appreciated Giuliani’s pugnacious and never-back-down attitude, Trump allies fear Giuliani will damage Trump with his long-winded monologues and free-wheeling accusations.

The constant sniping from staff could ultimately force Trump to dump his long-valued fixer, as he has done with former personal lawyer Michael Cohen and countless other ousted officials, like ex-Attorney General Jeff Sessions and former chief strategist Steve Bannon.

“Rudy Giuliani needs to stop talking,” said a former campaign official who remains close to Trump’s team.

Giuliani has been Trump’s attack dog since he was hired as an unpaid personal attorney April 2018. But the president’s unpaid personal lawyer has now found himself at the center of an unfolding controversy over the president’s attempts to get the Ukrainian president to open an investigation into Biden and his son, Hunter.

To numerous Trump advisers, though, the appearances have hurt more than they’ve helped the president.

“Rudy right now needs to focus on himself and not Ukraine,” said an outside Trump adviser.

For now, Trump is sticking with Giuliani, or “My Rudy,” as Giuliani said the president sometimes calls him. “Nothing has changed on that,” said Giuliani’s own attorney, Jon Sale.

...Don Goldberg, who helped respond to congressional investigations in the Clinton White House, said Giuliani shouldn’t be helping Trump when he’s facing his own problems.

“It’s so messed up,” he said. “You’d think a president would want to have competent counsel if you’re talking about fighting for your political life. We’re so far not seeing that with the caliber he’s been using.”

...“I think he’s massively hurting,” said a person close to the Trump campaign. “His TV appearances are so confused and contradictory, he’s creating an impression of internal chaos.”

“He’s inarticulate,” said a Republican who speaks to the president. “Rudy hurts the president with inconsistent, confusing messages.”

One former senior administration official described it this way when asked what Trump’s strategy against impeachment should be: “Hopefully Rudy will be on the space shuttle.”

So far, Trump has not heeded the advice.

“As long as Giuliani is doing battle with the president’s perceived critics and opponents, that’s what matters to the president,” said Republican strategist Kevin Madden, who worked for Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign. “The efficiency of the performance isn't as important as the willingness to do battle.”

Trump admires Giuliani’s brand, his loyalty and his Trump-like style, according to people familiar with their relationship. He has both political and legal experience at the national level, and has known the president for decades.

“They have a brotherly relationship,” said a second Republican who speaks to the president. “He likes his combative style.”

At the White House Friday, senior aide Stephen Miller forcefully defended Giuliani. “You should all be grateful Rudy Giuliani is helping to shine a light on the endemic corruption that occurred while Joe Biden was vice president,” he told reporters, alluding to unsubstantiated claims that Biden got a Ukrainian prosecutor fired to protect his son.

Republican strategist John Feehery said Trump loves what he is doing. “If this were any other president, Rudy would be a disaster,” he said. “There is a method to the madness. The goal is to always stay on offense and not be defensive.”

CNN reported that Rudy stays but won't be dealing with Ukraine any more. And David Faris, in his essay All The President's Goons asserts that if Trump is eventually felled by Rudy's comical exploits, "he will have no one to blame but himself. From the moment that he descended the elevator in 2015 to announce what would become his years-long grip on American politics and the national psyche, President Trump's greatest weakness has been his tendency to surround himself with cartoonish, wild-eyed cranks who are either too ignorant to understand their own lawlessness or so brazenly immoral that they don't care."

The Ukraine escapade is something that a half-competent, bottom-of-the-class lawyer with even a small shred of integrity could have warned (or tried to warn) the president away from. But that's not the kind of person who works for this president. Late-stage Rudy Giuliani, however he got this way, is the perfect functionary for Trump's Derp State-- barely in control of his faculties, gripped by hallucinatory delusions, brimming with bloodthirsty loathing for Democrats, and perfectly willing to commit broad-daylight crimes to cover up other broad-daylight crimes.

...All of this [Ukraine] madness is almost incomprehensible. President Trump, having effectively neutered the Mueller investigation by finding one of the few savvy crooks in D.C. willing to be his attorney general, had no need to relitigate the issue of 2016 election interference, and he certainly had no need to so ostentatiously kneecap Biden, who has proven to be very much not up to the task of conducting a 21st-century presidential campaign and who likely would have lost his front-runner status regardless of whether his son's grifty-but-legal work in Ukraine ever saw the light of day. It's like a murderer getting caught after returning to the scene of the crime. Instead of fighting off an impeachment inquiry, the president could be focused on his trade war with China, or firing up the latest culture war episode, or doing any number of things that might have some conceivable political benefit.

It is incomprehensible, that is, until you remember that the president and his fellow travelers in Trumpworld rose to this position after a lifetime of unaccountable criming. Why pay the contractors when you can stiff them? Why create a thriving, legitimate business when you can rip off investors and slip out the side door? Why operate a legitimate university when you can simply scam people for half the overhead? Why obtain consent when you can just rape and grope and lie about it?

But the constant churn of betrayal and legal trouble and abuse in Trumpworld is also the source of his current troubles. In the private sector, there is at least the promise of instant riches in return for yoking yourself to a man like Donald Trump. But for smart, decent, law-abiding people to join him in government is another story. In comparison to other available and fully legal pathways of self-enrichment, taking a gig working for the executive branch of the United States is not terribly lucrative in the here and now.

Sure, down the road you may get that morning show on Fox or the cushy consulting job, but in the meantime you actually have to move to D.C. and do the thing. This is a problem even for above-the-board administrations. Trumpworld offers an additional disincentive, which is the high likelihood that merely stumbling into this family's orbit will lead you to require expensive, long-term legal representation. That's how the president ended up in bed with people like Paul Manafort and Steve Bannon and George Papadopoulos-- for a while, before it became clear that President Trump could basically get away with anything because of congressional Republicans, these were the only people willing to risk their careers and freedom on behalf of a sub-literate game show host who was rather obviously running the most elaborate political grift in human history.

That brings us back to Giuliani, a man whose sordid journey from America's Mayor to spit-flecked, raving maniac will fascinate historians for years. In the spring of 2016, when many in the party were still praying for some kind of deus ex-machina at the Republican National Convention to derail Trump's nomination, Giuliani endorsed him. And sometime between 2008 and 2016, Giuliani seems to have completely lost his mind. His 2008 address to the Republican National Convention was boilerplate-- some cheerleading for the McCain-Palin ticket and some scripted attacks on Obama and Biden. It was, if anything, completely unremarkable, the work of a consummate party loyalist doing whatever was asked of him.

In 2016, on the other hand, he delivered an utterly unhinged address: "The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe," he screamed. About Donald Trump, he claimed, preposterously, "This is a man with a big heart who loves people, all people from the top to the bottom." Toward the conclusion he announced, ominously, "There is no next election." Like much of what Giuliani says these days, it was both hilariously bizarre and also terrifying.

That's the kind of hostage performance that wins you favor with the president. Of all the people who got suckered into Trumpworld, Giuliani was one of the few who brought with them an intact (if unearned) reputation in polite society. Trump either did not notice or did not care that Giuliani had lost the plot. And when he, absurdly, brought Giuliani on board in April 2018 as part of his defense team during the Mueller probe, he set himself on course for precisely the kind of presidency-destroying shenanigans that he eventually collided with. Five minutes of watching Giuliani on TV should have been sufficient to convince anyone that he should be as far away from any aspect of presidential strategy as possible.

Anyone, that is, except President Trump, for whom Giuliani's madcap nightly ravings have been a combination of validation and inspiration. In the end, the president appears to have allowed Giuliani to talk him into the most public crime ever committed by a president in American history.

We'll soon find out whether either man will pay for their transgressions. All we know for now is that even if Giuliani is working for free, President Trump is overpaying him.