Jason [last name withheld] wrote to ask me — and I'll try to make this the last mention of Rudy Giuliani on this site for a while — the following question…
If your friend Jake Tapper stuck a microphone in your face and asked you what you think has been going on with Giuliani in this trial, what would you say?
Well, first of all, my "friendship" with Jake Tapper consists of talking with him for about 15 minutes at a National Cartoonist Society convention and we spent 13 of those minutes talking about newspaper cartoonists, Walt Kelly especially. So that's a pretty loose application of the word "friend."
I think what's been going on with Giuliani in his recent trial has been a matter of trying to have it both ways: To settle the lawsuit for the lowest amount of cash and to retain whatever credibility and popularity he might still have with the MAGA crowd…and I don't think that was humanly possible. Earlier this year, his attorneys in the defamation case submitted this stipulation…
Defendant Giuliani, for the purposes of litigation only, does not contest that, to the extent the statements were statements of fact and other wise actionable, such actionable factual statements were false.
In other words: Giuliani's lawyers conceded on his behalf that he lied. But that doesn't sit well with the portion of MAGA World that still wants to believe there's all this evidence that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election. It's a key component of Trump's popularity with them that he never apologizes, never admits when he's wrong, insist he won in every instance when he loses, and that he never allows that "the other side" might be anything other than stupid and/or evil. Giuliani is not the only Trump-wannabe who tries to emulate those principles.
Rudy, I suspect, feels he can't afford to lose whatever portion of that mob hasn't already turned on him for not flipping that '20 election. After all, when he fundraises for loot to pay his legal fees and the massive judgement, those are the only folks who might donate. So that explains why outside the courtroom, he's telling reporters (and therefore, his followers) that he would take the stand and make "definitively clear" that what he said about the two campaign workers "was true" while inside the courthouse, his attorneys were saying the opposite.
Trying to have it both ways. Trump has gotten away with that a number of times and Rudy has, too. When he was spearheading all those lawsuits to get states to toss out the results of their vote count in '20 or even just award the state to Trump, what Rudy said in speeches and soundbites was very different from what was presented in court. He tried the same thing in this defamation case and it worked just as poorly as it did there.
That's what I've concluded from my Rudywatching and I'm going to try to look away for a while.
