Mmore than two decades ago, he was hailed as ‘mayor of the world’. Now Rudy Guiliani’s image is intertwined with Donald Trump’s presidency, especially his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results.
The transformation may seem shocking to those who first became aware of Giuliani as New York’s sober leader following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack. But Giuliani’s actions as a federal prosecutor in the 1980s and in the politics of the mayor of New York in the 1990s show traces of the same tactics he used to help Trump spread lies about fraud in the 2020 election, according to a TIME Studios documentary aired Sunday on MSNBC.
Giuliani has “used demagoguery, half-truths and provocations throughout his career,” says the Reverend Al Sharpton, longtime civil rights activist and founder of the National Action Network, in the documentary. “The way you do politics is to find an enemy, defeat them, play on people’s fears and prejudices. He needs an enemy.
Giuliani was at the forefront of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. With the votes still being counted on election night in 2020, Giuliani told President Trump to “go say we won according to testimony to the House committee on Jan. 6 by senior Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller. That’s exactly what Trump did, saying “frankly, we won this election” in the early morning of November 4, before the election was called. Over the next two months, Giuliani played a central, public role in spreading false allegations of voter fraud. Speaking at the Stop the Steal rally on the Ellipse outside the White House on Jan. 6, Giuliani told the crowd of Trump supporters, “Let’s do a trial by fight. In a May 2021 court filing, Giuliani said he spoke “hyperbolically” at the Jan. 6 rally. Of his repeated allegations of voter fraud, Giuliani told the DC Bar’s Board of Directors on Professional Responsibility in December: “I was alleging responsibly, based on the things that were told to me by other people. I wasn’t proving — I had a long way to go to prove,” according to CNN.
In the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan appointed Giuliani Associate Attorney General at the Justice Department headquarters in Washington, that enemy was Haitian refugees seeking protection in the United States. Giuliani gave interviews at the time to defend the mass detention of Haitian immigrants who arrived in Florida and were held in a detention center outside Miami, on the edge of the Everglades. “Any of these people who are in detention are not in jail because any of them can easily leave and go back to Haiti,” Rudy said in an interview at the time.
Peter Noel, Author of Why Blacks Fear ‘America’s Mayor’, says Rudy’s actions at the Justice Department were the first echoes of his deployment of tough policing tactics in New York City in the 1990s that disproportionately targeted black and brown citizens. “He saw black people as delinquents. His attitude towards the Haitians, what he did to them, people remember. The whole idea of bringing people together, bringing them together in the Krome Detention Center in the Florida Everglades,” says Noel.
Giuliani brought nostalgia for an earlier era to his public life. It was a rhetorical device he used as recently as last year, when he opposed his son Andrew’s failed bid for governor of New York State in 2022. “Andrew Giuliani is the guy to vote for if you want to see the kind of changes that Donald Trump brought to the country, that I brought to New York City, and that Ronald Reagan, who was my boss, brought to the country,” Giuliani said during a campaign stop for Andrew. ” Like before. I remember it because I was part of it.
Norman Siegel, a civil rights lawyer who attended New York University law school with Giuliani in the late 1960s, says the turmoil of that decade was transformative for many, but not for Giuliani. “I changed because America is going through a transformation to create inclusion, equality, freedom, justice for all,” Siegel said. “But I don’t think Rudy has changed much in those three years. And when I think back on it, it was a missed opportunity.
During Giuliani’s unsuccessful first run for mayor in the 1990s, he appealed to Republican campaign muddy Roger Ailes who would later run Fox News. Ailes designed campaign ads that escalated fears of street crime and violence in an attempt to turn voters against running Democrat David Dinkins. “Roger Ailes was brought in in the middle of the campaign as we were floundering, we didn’t have a message, we weren’t doing much TV advertising if any,” said Charlie Perkins, Giuliani’s former press secretary. “At first, I think there was a horror among those who were campaigning.” Dinkins won the race and became New York’s first black mayor.
But Giuliani took this divisive approach by becoming an outspoken critic of Dinkins during his tenure, siding with white police officers who have violently protested Dinkins’ efforts to hold the New York Police Department more accountable. “The reason New York City Police Department morale is so low is one reason and one reason only, David Dinkins,” Giuliani said at the time. Giuliani would eventually defeat Dinkins in 1993 and become mayor.
“If you’re surprised by the decline and fall – or really the crash and burn – of Rudy Giuliani,” says Kevin Baker, author of America the Ingenious: How a nation of dreamers, immigrants and do-it-yourselfers changed the world, “You weren’t paying attention.”
When Truth Isn’t Truth: The Rudy Giuliani Story is a new four-part series from TIME Studios and MSNBC Films. The series explores the former prosecutor and mayor’s rise to power, his fall from grace, and what little change he has undergone in the meantime. Watch Sunday, February 19 at 10 p.m. ET on MSNBC and stream on Peacock TV.
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