Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
Everybody from MSNBC to Fox News is baffled by Rudy Giuliani’s whirlwind press strategy in recent days, which has potentially implicated his client President Donald Trump in crimes and changed the narrative of the explosive Trump Tower Moscow deal more times than anyone can count.
At either the pinnacle or the rock bottom of this mystifying performance, depending on your perspective, Giuliani declared in an interview with The New Yorker that he’s worried his tombstone will read, “Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump.”
And according to a new report Tuesday by Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman, Trump is furious about Giuliani’s public relations disaster.
“Trump is screaming,” one of Sherman’s Republican sources said. “He’s so mad at Rudy.”
Giuliani has claimed that the president is not angry, he just wants to truth to be known. But Giuliani has contradicted himself so many times, there’s every reason to think he might soon reveal that the president has been cursing him out.
Sherman also reports that some of Trump’s closest advisers, including daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner, want the president to fire the former mayor of New York.
The report continues:
As Giuliani’s unforced errors pile up, former West Wing officials and 2016 campaign veterans are privately debating what’s gone wrong with Rudy. Why, they ask, is he making statements that so obviously damage his client? A former White House official speculated that maybe Giuliani “has lost his mind.” But there are other, more charitable ways of interpreting Giuliani’s interviews. As I’ve previously reported, the Trump-Giuliani relationship hasn’t been good for weeks. Giuliani has said privately that he “hates the job” and that Mueller’s final report will be “horrific” for Trump. Facing these challenges and pressures, it’s understandable he would make mistakes, the thinking goes. “Everyone who works for Trump screws up because there’s no way to please the guy,” an outside Trump adviser said.
Sherman also said that it seems Giuliani is addicted to the press attention he gets from his position — something he hasn’t received since his political star faded.
As Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani has taken on an excessively public role, leading many to believe that he is running more of a public relations strategy than a legal defense. Many also speculate that it may be Giuliani’s role to muddy the waters and get out ahead of bad news when possible to dampen the blow. But if Giuliani’s role is mainly that of communications, it seems he could almost certainly be doing a better job if he didn’t keep revealing incriminating facts about the president and then backpedaling. It may be that the simplest explanation of Giuliani’s behavior is the right one: He’s not good at his job.
