“When did Rudy Giuliani derail?” is a question that many Americans, especially New Yorkers, have been asking themselves for years, without coming to a clear consensus. Longtime observers of the local political scene like to go back to a time two decades ago when he famously laughed at a ferret-ownership advocate on a radio show, told him he needed “help” and that his “excessive concern for small weasels’ was a ‘disease’.
On the other hand — and perhaps this is the point, there was a different hand — the man had yelled repeatedly on the show, sometimes in the middle of the night, harassing staff members, Mr. Giuliani argued. Maybe if you dial in at 3 a.m. to move the needle on fret policy, are you real? should talk to someone.
About a year later, in another turn that probably hasn’t won any fans among practitioners of civility, Mr. Giuliani suggested he would leave his wife, Donna Hanover, at a press conference in Bryant Park, after not telling her first. But really, what was to be done? Though a candidate for the United States Senate, he was a man in love, one who put politics “at least second,” he told a stunned press corps, “maybe third, maybe fourth, somewhere else.” He would soon be stepping out of a race that would bring Hillary Clinton into office. While battling prostate cancer, he said he would turn “more now than maybe I did before” Judith Nathan, a nurse he met at an Upper East Side cigar bar, who would eventually become his third ex-wife.
Yet turn-of-the-century Rudy Giuliani, recovering from missteps, as America’s mayor in the wake of September 11, was very different from the version we’ve seen recently – the unhinged reality denier, the one of mysterious leakage seeping from his temples, hosted a political press conference inexplicably held in a landscaping facility, a subject of investigation by both the Justice Department and the State of Georgia into attempts to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election.
And yet even That Rudy Giuliani, the former mafia-busting federal prosecutor who had come to direct a combative rage at the serious business of thwarting democracy, seems to have little in common with the man who this week chose to create an enemy who was not of the global drug trade. people smugglers, or the American voting system, but rather a 39-year-old grocery store worker who didn’t like him.
As if relegated from a fondness for Mortal Kombat X to Magic the Gathering, Mr. Giuliani went after Daniel Gill, a ShopRite employee who, according to the former mayor, assaulted him during a campaign rally for his son, Andrew, who made a botched attempt. to become the Republican nominee for governor. According to police reports, Mr Gill called the former mayor “an asshole” and apparently verbally abused his stance on abortion. He was then charged with second-degree assault and spent a night in police custody before a video surfaced showing the attack as something more benign — a pat on the back. Mr Gill was eventually charged with misdemeanor.
Mayor Eric Adams, who appeared on Tuesday in “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” weighed in and compared his predecessor to the woman who falsely accused a black bird watcher of threatening her in Central Park two years ago. As he had previously claimed, the current resident of City Hall claimed that Mr. Giuliani should be investigated for falsely reporting a crime. The former mayor did not want to grab a thesaurus and responded by calling the current one ‘an asshole’. But even conservative newscaster Greg Kelly questioned Mr Giuliani’s account of the events. “I have to be honest,” he told him during an on-air interview, “it doesn’t look that bad.”
But Mr. Giuliani didn’t have it. Who knows what could have happened to him? — serious injury, perhaps even death. He was old – ‘elderly’, in his own words – and apparently content to become the new face of fragility politics. That all of this was happening on Staten Island — where overwhelmingly voters voted Donald Trump twice — seemed to test his worldview in a way he couldn’t reconcile. “I wore 85 percent of Staten Island,” Mr. Giuliani said of one of his mayoral elections during a press conference streamed on Facebook, as his head sank into the collar of a white button-down shirt with broad horizontal stripes that seemed to say , “I once played rugby.”
He continued: “Guy Molinari used to joke that the only people on Staten Island who voted against me accidentally voted for me.” What happened? Staten Island, for example, became an important site in a growing national labor movement. Maybe there were less safe places left.
