Giuliani's fall: From "America's Mayor" to Trump's biggest patsy
The continuing saga of the GOP's moral meltdown in the age of Trump.
Rudy Giuliani got disbarred in September. Yes, we’re talking about the very same man who nearly a quarter century ago swaggered through post-9/11 New York City like a demigod in a $6,000 Brioni suit. How the mighty have fallen.
I’ve gotten into the habit of unwinding in front of old episodes of Law and Order, which air regularly on channels like BBC America and Sundance. Since high school I’ve enjoyed the episodic, cookie-cutter nature of the long-running NBC franchise; I used to watch it religiously with my mom, so returning to it now feels like peeling back the curtain on an earlier, simpler time. These days it’s therapeutic, if nothing else.
The heyday of Law and Order, in my view, was the late 1990s and early 2000s, when it prided itself on being a show whose themes and plot points were “ripped from the headlines.” Enthusiasts will recall how, immediately after 9/11, the writers and producers took every opportunity to blend the trappings of the post-9/11 NYC landscape into the show. Case in point: I was watching an episode a couple of weeks ago when none other than Giuliani (playing himself as the mayor of NYC) strolls into the camera’s view, chatting amiably with ADA Jack McCoy (Sam Waterston) and Lt. Anita van Buren (S. Epatha Merkerson), while everyone else in the scene looks on with reverent admiration.
After September 11, Giuliani was ubiquitous: glad handing with reporters, visiting the injured in the hospital, cheering on first responders. Now fast forward to today. Nobody has any reverence for this man. Instead, Giuliani is broke and disbarred in New York and D.C. He faces a daunting series of significant legal challenges stemming from his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Indicted in Arizona along with 17 other Trump associates, Giuliani is accused of participating in a fraudulent scheme to overturn election results and signing on to a false slate of electors. This indictment is part of a broader pattern of legal troubles for the former mayor, who also faces 13 felony counts in Georgia related to the same election efforts in his official role as one of former and future president Donald Trump’s personal attorneys from 2018 to 2020. In fact, it is this relationship with Trump that ultimately cost Giuliani his legal career, his Manhattan apartment, his beloved sports memorabilia, and whatever shred of credibility he had left.
In addition to the election-related charges, Giuliani has also been named in several high-profile lawsuits. This summer he was ordered to pay $148 million in damages for defamation to two Georgia election workers whom he falsely accused of voter fraud, leading him to file for bankruptcy. The two women, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, successfully petitioned the courts earlier this year to give them control over Giuliani’s assets, which include a $5 million apartment in NYC, a condo in Palm Beach, and a 1980 Mercedes-Benz 500SL. So far, they have received some expensive watches and the car (sans tags and title), but Giuliani has been moving stuff from his apartment into storage units on Long Island in a bid to keep the women from physically taking over his assets, which are rightfully and legally theirs. Moreover, he faces a $10 million lawsuit from former associate Noelle Dunphy, who has accused him of sexual misconduct and harassment. Giuliani is also implicated in ongoing lawsuits from Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic for spreading false claims about their voting machines. Trump’s grubby little fingers are all over this man’s fall from grace, and yet here lately the right has been suspiciously silent on Rudy. A man once considered a legitimate presidential candidate (with cameos on Law and Order!) is now scurrying to hide away his earthly possessions in a storage unit before creditors and legal claimants can get to them. This is what happens to everything—and everyone—Trump touches.
Further complicating his legal situation, Giuliani was identified as “co-conspirator 1” in the federal indictment against Trump, indicating his involvement in efforts to spread false claims about the election. However, with this week’s announcement that special counsel Jack Smith has dropped the federal charges against Trump (in accordance with DOJ policy), it is now unclear whether Giuliani will be charged in this matter. His mounting legal issues have not only strained his finances—he has reportedly sought help from Trump to cover legal fees (oh to be a fly on the wall during that conversation)—but also significantly tarnished his public image as a once-revered political figure. To be clear, as Smith wrote to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, the federal judge overseeing Trump’s election interference case, the government’s case against Trump “is categorical and does not turn on the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the government’s proof or the merits of the prosecution, which the government stands fully behind.”
Dramatic falls from grace are as American as O.J. Simpson and apple pie. But this particular Icarian plummet is astounding to me because Giuliani, once the so-called “Mayor of America”—riding high on a wave of national admiration, all while wearing his badge of honor as the guy who led the city through its darkest days—is today a man who more closely resembles an overcooked spaghetti noodle with a speech impediment.
But let’s not focus merely on Rudy’s downward spiral. His disbarments encapsulate a broader, more troubling reality for the Republicans—a party that seems to have lost whatever moral compass it may have once had. Donald Trump’s influence has transformed the GOP into a circus, where the ringmaster calls the shots, Elon bounces around on stage, and everyone else is just trying not to trip over the clown shoes.
It’s hard to ignore the brain rot creeping through contemporary conservatism. Here we have a party that once prided itself on family values, fiscal responsibility, and principled leadership, now scrambling to align itself with the chaotic, self-serving whims of a man whose name is synonymous with scandal and stupidity. Forget about principles or policy; the new game is who can make the loudest, most hate-filled noise and garner the most outrage in the twisted reality that has become the right wing media ecosystem.
Take, for example, SC representative Nancy Mace. Emboldened by Trump’s win on November 5, Mace has taken her transphobic sideshow to the national arena, launching an incredibly hateful and (gasp!) downright unprofessional campaign against a fellow lawmaker, Delaware representative-elect Sarah McBride. For her part, McBride calls the rhetoric “an attempt to distract” from the issues. And it is certainly that, only not in the way that people usually mean. Instead, it’s a distraction from the increasingly apparent fact that the Republicans are out of ideas. There is no “there” there. It’s grievance and grift all the way down disguised as transphobia, anger over expensive gas (that is now at a national low), and an allergy to “woke,” whatever that was. Donald Trump gives the Republicans a golden opportunity to do what they have long wanted to do: stop doing their homework. The new playbook sees to be: stop pretending that the party is anything other than a hate fest, abandon policies and ideas, and run solely on misplaced outrage.
Look. The nation is in the midst of a reckoning with trans rights. It’s a complicated and difficult issue, and as a straight, white, forty-four year old man from the South who currently resides in the Midwest, I do not claim to be anywhere near the bleeding edge of this conversation. But what I do know is that Nancy Mace is a fraud and a shill. Her congressional district got redrawn recently and is now much more Republican than previously, so, predictably, she doubles down on identity and social issues. She’s openly discriminating against one of her congressional colleagues simply to get attention—and it’s working.
The fall of Giuliani is also symptomatic of this larger sickness affecting the Republican party and, by extension, the rest of the country. It has been both public and precipitous, driven largely by his unyielding loyalty to Donald Trump and his role in perpetuating lies about the 2020 election. Giuliani's descent from respected statesman to an embattled figure fighting multiple criminal charges is emblematic of the broader moral erosion within Trump’s orbit. And this is now, once again, a national problem. Rather than defending democratic principles, Giuliani staked his reputation on Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, leading to his involvement in a series of failed legal challenges and ultimately, his implication in criminal conspiracies. His legal troubles, ranging from racketeering charges in Georgia to defamation suits and election interference accusations, paint a stark picture of a man who sacrificed his legacy on the altar of political opportunism.
What pretenders like Guiliani and Mace fail to realize is that none of their sweaty fealty matters to Trump, who will drop them like hot turds as soon as it is politically expedient for him to do so. In August of last year, Giuliani traveled to Mar-a-Lago to basically beg Trump for money to pay his bills. Trump, for his part, never talks publicly about Giuliani.
Giuliani’s decision to stand by Trump, even as the former president’s falsehoods about the election began to unravel in courtrooms across the country, reveals not just a professional miscalculation but a profound moral lapse. It is one thing to argue a losing case; it is another to knowingly advance lies that undermine the very democratic institutions Giuliani once claimed to protect. In aligning himself so closely with Trump, Giuliani seemed to adopt the former president’s transactional ethos, where truth is malleable and loyalty to a singular figure outweighs fidelity to the law.
But here’s the ironclad law of Trumpism: there can only be one Trump. What Mace, Giuliani, Lindsay Graham, and so many other loyalists don’t seem to get is that this anti-democratic, flaunt-the-law bullshit won’t work for them. It only works for Trump.
And this is precisely what has gotten the entire Republican party in trouble, despite what happened on November 5. (Lest Trumpism infect all our brains, let me remind everyone at this point that you can win big and still be morally bankrupt.) This moral unraveling is not Giuliani’s alone; it is a reflection of the broader dysfunction that Trump has injected into the GOP. In tying his fortunes to Trump, Giuliani became a willing participant in a political movement defined by grievance, deception, and disdain for both expertise and democratic norms. His fall from grace, while deeply personal, is also a symbol of the price paid by those who embrace the poison of Trumpism: a loss of credibility, a collapse of ethical boundaries, and ultimately, the forfeiture of whatever legacy they once held. For Giuliani, his downfall serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when power is pursued at the expense of principle. And here’s the kicker: Giuliani, in his desperate attempt to cling to relevance, has adopted stances that few would cop to under ordinary circumstances. Remember: this is a man who once brought notorious mob bosses to justice. Now he’s illegally moving his stuff to a storage unit on Long Island so his creditors can’t get to it. I mean, really.
So, here we are, witnessing the GOP imitating the long shadow of Trump’s moral bankruptcy at every turn. The party seems to be careening toward a point of no return, abandoning any pretense of moral clarity, or even reality. Giuliani’s disbarment serves as a cautionary tale, a warning that political glory can be fleeting and that a reputation can crumble faster than a sandcastle at high tide.
A lot of people believe that September 11 was a turning point for American democracy—the beginning of the end, if you will. If that’s the case, then perhaps November 5 is also a turning point, of sorts, in that the destruction and waste and human suffering that the second Trump presidency will inevitably bring—doubling down on trade protectionism with onerous tariffs, deporting millions of illegal immigrants in the midst of an historic housing crisis (nearly 25% of workers in the construction trades are illegal immigrants)—will expedite the wake up call we are heading for. The proof is in the pudding, as they say, and Trump can’t live forever. No amount of Trumpish spin will be able to shield the Republicans from 12% year-over-year inflation, a housing crisis spiraling even further out of control, and mass unemployment. What worries me is whether American democracy can withstand it either.