Donald and Rudy

As many struggle to explain Giuliani’s willingness to serve, without pay, as the president’s personal attorney and “shadow foreign policy” attaché, the two often are characterized as old friends and allies.

  Politico

I would call the relationship a mutually assured destruction pact. They each no doubt know enough about the other's criminal activity to make it even odds who might turn on whom. And in the situation they have now, it's likely that it will have to be Rudy who falls on his sword, because Trump can pardon him.  He just better play his cards right and exercise the best timing to avoid being "flipped" and end up like Michael Cohen.

“My friend for a long time,” in the words of Trump, according to Jay Sekulow, another of his attorneys. It’s not quite that simple, though, say the New York politicos, former Giuliani aides, former Trump employees and biographers of both men I spoke to this week. It’s in fact more revealing than that.

The relationship, in the estimation of those who know them well, always has been a predominantly transactional one, a function of proximity, pragmatism and a kind of philosophical kinship. [...] Both of them vengeful and constitutionally untrusting, indefatigable and resolutely unapologetic, ideologically malleable but politically driven, they boasted showman sensibilities and a willingness to co-opt each other’s fame as their careers rose and fell. [...] They both seemed to see publicity as a sort of sustenance. They both had a taste for black-and-white, law-and-order rhetoric. They both wanted to be president.

[...]

For most of the '90s, Giuliani, of course, was mayor of New York, while Trump had to scrap to stay solvent and mitigate reputational stain as he plotted his comeback. In the 2000s, though, they basked in the glow of unexpected boosts, the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, casting Giuliani as “America’s Mayor” and the early ratings bonanza and pop-culture reach of “The Apprentice” recasting Trump as a singularly successful business boss.

[...]

And now here they are, Trump and Giuliani, staring at the prospect of Trump’s impeachment before the new year. Trump recently started to distance himself from Giuliani, according to a former senior administration official, before being told that was a bad idea. Even as allies grow increasingly frustrated with Giuliani’s loose-lipped, on-air antics, cast-aside aides can turn into enemies, and that, the thinking goes, is the last thing this administration needs at this moment of heightening risk. “I don’t think Trump has any choice now but to keep Giuliani close,” the senior administration official said.

But Trump is sometimes self-destructive - or would be if anyone tried to hold him accountable for anything - and Rudy could become a bigger liability. Especially since he's under investigation for his involvement with Parnas and Fruman. If they're pulling threads, Rudy could come unraveled.

Just a bit of what Rudy knows:

Tony Lombardi, a federal agent who worked directly for Giuliani, then still in the top spot at the SDNY, opened a quiet, informal investigation into a potentially fraudulent sale of a Trump Tower duplex to Robert Hopkins, the burly, mob-tied head of New York’s biggest gambling ring, according to the reporting of Wayne Barrett, who wrote about this in the Village Voice in October of 1993 and again in the New York Daily News in September of 2016. The transaction had included a briefcase stuffed with $200,000 in cash and a loan from a New Jersey bank that had done business with Trump’s casinos. A Trump limo delivered the money to the bank. Trump himself had attended the closing. And Hopkins’ mortgage broker, seeking leniency on an unrelated charge, was saying Trump had “participated” in money-laundering and was willing to wear a wire to help. But Lombardi—who subsequently, albeit fleetingly, became friendly with Trump, and who died in 2015—talked twice with Trump, decided Trump had “answered all my questions,” and closed the probe before it even got a case number.

And I don't doubt there are some sex scandals, likely tied to Jeffrey Epstein, who conveniently died, that Rudy knows about (and perhaps participated in).

Broadly speaking, they were part of the same crowd—the people, the personalities, really, who tended to show up the most in the gossip pages of the Daily News and Newsday and the New York Post and New York magazine.

“Characters of a type,” Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio said.

“Tabloid icons,” Giuliani biographer Andrew Kirtzman said. “Rudy Giuliani, George Steinbrenner, Donald Trump, and Al Sharpton, and Ed Koch … they were in a very tight club, and there was probably a mutual admiration among them as well as competition. … They worked the media, impeccably, all of them, and they were in a club, you know, going back to the 1980s.”

[...]

For a little attention, the two of them would do just about anything.

“Trump put himself wherever he could to get his name in the paper,” former New York Congressman Charlie Rangel told me this week. Ditto Giuliani. “When people know that other people are going to get publicity, both Giuliani and Trump would be attracted to being there.”

[...]

Peak Rudy was the wake of the terror of September 11, 2001. People called him “America’s Mayor.” Time called him the “Mayor of the World,” and the Person of the Year. The Queen of England knighted him.

Trump, meanwhile, was … not. He was still two-plus years from his life-altering role on reality TV.

[...]

A year and a half later, though, as Giuliani mostly bided time until he started running for president in 2007—he thought he might have been in a position to run in 2004 had Al Gore beaten George W. Bush in 2000—Trump found himself, somewhat shockingly, newly ascendant, and all of a sudden ubiquitous, and he tossed Giuliani a cameo in the second season of “The Apprentice,” when the program was near its most popular point. In the fourth of the 14 episodes that season, which aired in late September, the winners of that show’s contest got to meet with Giuliani—“one of the greatest leaders in the country,” Trump told them. Giuliani was that week’s reward.

“Their prize was a great one: They would get to go over to Rudy Giuliani’s new office at Times Square and have a discussion with the man himself,” Trump said in one of the books he had pumped out that year, Think Like a Billionaire.

Wow. What a prize.

Giuliani, Trump recalled in the book, spent “over an hour” giving them a tour of his office. He showed them a sign on his desk. “I’M RESPONSIBLE,” it read.

He'll be taking that sign with him under the bus.

By early 2015, Giuliani’s rhetoric about the 44th president had grown far more harsh—more along the lines of what people had grown accustomed to from Trump.

“I do not believe that the president loves America,” he said at a private dinner at New York’s 21 Club. “He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.”

[...]

It took him 10 months to endorse Trump.

Once he was in, though, he was … all in.

Giuliani was, in the words of campaign brass Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, a “super surrogate.”

[...]

“I’ll do all of them,” Giuliani offered. “I’ll do every Sunday show.”

[...]

“Rudy wanted to be relevant again,” a former aide told me. “And Trump gave him that platform.”

“I didn’t find it curious when all of a sudden there was Rudy as a Trump supporter,” former Manhattan borough president Ruth Messinger said when we talked this week, “because he’s interested in power. I think he was a person who was singularly unhappy being out of power.”

[...]

After Trump won, Giuliani wanted to be secretary of State, but Trump made him a cybersecurity adviser instead. He was undeterred, though. Giuliani joined the president’s legal team.

Working gratis. That should be his clue that Trump sees him simply as something to use and throw away when he's no longer useful.

Mainly, though, Giuliani has continued to be one of his more ardent and prominent attack dogs, as his interactions with reporters and appearances on TV have grown increasingly histrionic.

Giuliani has, say people who have known him, worked for him and watched him over the years, living vicariously through Trump.

“He wanted to be president,” a former aide told me this week, “and this is as close as he’ll get.”

[...]

Richard Ravitch, the 86-year-old former chairman of the New York State Urban Development Corporation and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, has known both men for decades. We talked briefly the other day.

“They deserve each other,” he said.

[...]

“Because he’s got the same amount of hubris and the same Achilles’ heel that Trump has,” Trump biographer Tim O’Brien said, “which is that he hungers for and thrives on being in the public spotlight and cultivating power. And I think he saw Donald as a vehicle toward being a player again."

[...]

Wilson, the Giuliani aide-turned-Trump critic, sees this as the end of a tragic arc. “I think he reached a point where, you know, better to go out in the last gasp of excitement and fun and being a bomb-throwing, transgressive guy than to be the ex-mayor,” he told me. “There’s no other way Rudy’s going to be on TV every single day. There’s no other way he’s going to be in the center of the national discourse every single day. So you take this gig, you take the good with the bad. And, you know, the bad is you may be liable for a whole variety of shit. And the good is you go out famous.”

Or infamous.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.