US VOTE TRUMP
Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney at the time, at a news conference in a landscaping contractor’s parking lot November 7, 2020 in Philadelphia. Photo credit – Bryan R. Smith – AFP via Getty Images
More than two decades ago he was hailed as the “Mayor of the World”. Now, Rudy Guiliani’s image is intertwined with Donald Trump’s presidency, particularly his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The transformation may be unsettling to those who first perceived Giuliani as the sober leader of New York City after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack. The 1990s show traces of the same tactics he used to help Trump tell lies about fraud the 2020 election, according to a TIME Studios documentary aired on MSNBC Sunday.
Giuliani “has used demagogy, half-truths and provocation throughout his career,” says Rev. Al Sharpton, the longtime civil rights activist and founder of the National Action Network, in the documentary. “The way you do politics is to find an enemy, beat them up, play on people’s fears and prejudices. He needs an enemy.”
Giuliani spearheaded Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. While votes were still being tallied on election night 2020, Giuliani urged President Trump to “go up and say we won,” senior Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller testified before the Jan. 6 House committee. Trump did just that, saying “frankly, we won this election” early in the morning of November 4, before the election was called. Over the next two months, Giuliani played a public and central role in spreading false allegations of voter fraud. At the stop-the-steal rally on the Ellipse in front of the White House on Jan. 6, Giuliani told the crowd of Trump supporters, “Let’s have a trial by fight.” In a May 2021 court filing, Giuliani said he had spoken “hyperbolically” at the January 6 rally. Regarding his repeated allegations of voter fraud, Giuliani told the DC Bar’s Board of Professional Responsibility in December: “I have asserted responsibly based on things that have been told to me by other people. I didn’t prove it — I had a long way to go to prove it.”
In the early 1980s, when Giuliani was appointed Deputy Attorney General at Justice Department headquarters in Washington by Ronald Reagan, that enemy was Haitian refugees seeking shelter in the United States. Giuliani gave interviews at the time defending the mass incarceration of Haitian immigrants who had arrived in Florida and were being held in a detention center outside of Miami on the edge of the Everglades. “Any of these individuals who are in custody are not in prison because any of them can easily leave and return 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 early echoes of his introduction of tough police tactics in New York City in the 1990s that disproportionately targeted black and brown citizens. “He saw blacks as perpetrators. People remember his attitude towards the Haitians, what he did to them. The whole idea of locking people up, bringing them together at the Krome Detention Center down in the Florida Everglades,” says Noel.
Giuliani brought nostalgia for an earlier time into his public life. It was a rhetorical device he used just last year when he stumbled upon his son Andrew’s failed bid for New York state governor in 2022. “Andrew Giuliani is the guy to go for if you want to see the kind of changes that Donald Trump created for the country, that I created for the city of New York, and that Ronald Reagan, who was my boss, made for that country,” Giuliani said during a campaign stop for Andrew. “Like in old times. I remember because I was a part of it.”
Norman Siegel, a civil rights attorney who attended New York University School of Law with Giuliani in the late 1960s, says the turmoil of that decade changed many, but not Giuliani. “I’ve changed because America is undergoing a transformation to create inclusion, equality, freedom and justice for all,” Siegel said. “But I don’t think Rudy has changed much in those three years. And looking back, that was a missed opportunity.”
During Giuliani’s first, unsuccessful run for mayor in the 1990s, he brought in Republican campaign mudslinger Roger Ailes, who would go on to run Fox News. Ailes designed campaign ads that stoked fears of street crime and violence to try to turn voters against running Democrat David Dinkins. “Roger Ailes was brought in in the middle of the campaign when we stalled, we didn’t have messages, we didn’t do much TV advertising, if any,” said Charlie Perkins, Giuliani’s former press secretary. “At first, I think there was horror among those who campaigned.” Dinkins won the race and became New York City’s first black mayor.
But Giuliani embraced this divisive approach when he became a vocal critic of Dinkins during his tenure, siding with white cops who vigorously protested Dinkins’ efforts to make the New York City Police Department more accountable. “The reason the morale of the New York City Police Department is so low is for one reason and one reason only, David Dinkins,” Giuliani said at the time. Giuliani would defeat Dinkins in 1993 and become mayor.
“In case you’re surprised by Rudy Giuliani’s decline and fall — or actual crash and conflagration,” says Kevin Baker, author of America the Ingenious: How a Nation of Dreamers, Immigrants and Tinkerers 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 how little he’s changed since then. Watch Sunday, February 19 at 10:00 p.m. ET on MSNBC and stream on Peacock TV.
Don’t miss interesting posts on Famousbio
