Former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani spent the weekend trying desperately to repair some of the damage he caused to President Donald Trump with his media appearances earlier in the week — but he only managed to make things much, much worse.
Trump now appears to already be over Giuliani, at least according to the first tweets he has posted since Saturday.
If nothing else, Trump's tweets suggest that — despite Giuliani's regular insistence that the president is fully supportive both of him and of his public appearances — there may be some dissatisfaction on the president's part about his new attorney's ability to throw a wet blanket on the toxic stories emerging about Trump's administration.
Giuliani opened up his hastily scheduled Sunday interview with ABC News by insisting that he didn't know whether Trump had ever met with porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims that he had an affair with her. He attempted to deflect by pointing to her recent guest appearance on "Saturday Night Live" as evidence that she was drawing attention to claims that she had slept with Trump in order to achieve fame and fortune. Giuliani also reiterated a claim he has repeatedly made — namely, that because the payment by former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen to Daniels was not a campaign contribution, it wasn't illegal.
But when asked whether Cohen made payments to other women on Trump's behalf, similar to the hush agreement with Stormy Daniels, Giuliani fumbled: "I have no knowledge of that but I would think, if it was necessary, yes."
Giuliani also used the ABC News interview to reference Judge T. S. Ellis, a federal judge in Virginia who seemed to do the president a solid when he criticized the special counsel office's case against former Trump Campaign Manager Paul Manafort on the grounds that it was simply a pretext for digging up dirt on the president.
"You don’t really care about Mr. Manafort’s bank fraud. You really care about getting information that Mr. Manafort can give you that would reflect on Mr. Trump and lead to his prosecution or impeachment or whatever," Ellis had declared on Friday. The judge had also brought up the Stormy Daniels case and argued that "what we don’t want in this country is we don’t want anyone with unfettered power."
Giuliani made it clear that, while he doesn't believe Trump committed a crime, he also would discourage him from speaking to Special Counsel Robert Mueller about the topics of his investigation.
"They don't have a case on collusion, they don't have obstruction . . . I'm going to walk him into a prosecution for perjury, like Martha Stewart did? He's the president of the United States. We can assert privilege other presidents [have]," Giuliani told ABC News host George Stephanopoulos.
Giuliani acknowledged that, despite his own concerns about Trump talking to the special counsel's office, he understood that the president himself actually wants to do so.
"How can I ever be confident of that?” Giuliani rhetorically asked Stephanopoulos, according to The New York Times. "I’m facing a situation with the president and all the other lawyers are, in which every lawyer in America thinks he would be a fool to testify, I’ve got a client who wants to testify."
The president's lawyer and former mayor went on to characterize his situation as one of an attorney who wanted his client to cooperate but had been dissuaded from doing so by law enforcement's conduct. "Not after the way they've acted. I came into this case with a desire to [have the president talk to Mueller] and they just keep convincing me not to do it," Giuliani told Stephanopoulos.
Giuliani also defended Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, by insisting that there was no way Cohen had either broken the law or could describe anything incriminating about Trump himself to authorities.
"Michael Cohen doesn’t have any incriminating evidence on the president or himself. He's an honest, honorable lawyer," Giuliani told Stephanopoulos.
In an interview with The Washington Post after his appearance on ABC News, Giuliani seemed confident that he had achieved a PR coup d'état.
"I’ll give you the conclusion: We all feel pretty good that we’ve got everything kind of straightened out and we’re setting the agenda," Giuliani, the former New York mayor who recently joined Trump’s legal team, said in an interview with The Washington Post. Giuliani said he met with the president at Trump National Golf Club in Sterling, Va., to discuss developments and legal strategy.
"Everybody’s reacting to us now, and I feel good about that because that’s what I came in to do," he said.
"We’ve made a deal this weekend: He stays focused on North Korea, Iran and China, and we stay focused on the case and we’ll bother him when we have to," Giuliani said of his meeting with Trump.
Other conservatives have also argued that Giuliani's public appearances on Trump's behalf have been a success. Michael Graham of CBS News argued, for instance, that the amount of media attention surrounding Trump's various scandals has made it more difficult for any new controversy surrounding the president to really stick.
For nearly two years now, the Trump-unfriendly media and its Democratic allies have been promising the folks back home the big "Collusion Show!" soon followed by another 90's throwback (ala Roseanne): "Impeachment—This Time It's Personal."
Instead we've gotten the equivalent of "Al Capone's Vault." It may be the case that the Mueller investigation leads to a subpoena of the president, or even (very unlikely but possible) a criminal charge or even impeachment. But not for collusion. And voters who've seen thousands of hours of allegations and direct accusations from news desks across the cable channels are noticing that the oft-promised episode of "Vlad and Don's Excellent, Election-Stealing Adventure" has yet to hit their screens.
Taken altogether, it's easy for people who are feeling good about their personal circumstances and their nation's security to dismiss all the scandal as just more political white noise that's easy to tune out.
If that's the case, then Rudy Giuliani really might [know] what he's doing.
In one sense, Graham is probably right — with the constant stream of negative news that comes out about the president, it is unlikely that the lawyer's latest faux pas is going to do much more to derail the situation. At the same time, the reality remains that at some point the legal team investigating Trump is going to come up with answers and conclusions rather than merely more questions. If they conclude that the president did nothing illegal — that there really was no collusion with Russia, that the payments to Stormy Daniels were above-board, that the Trump family never abused its power for monetary gain — then all will be right in Trump world.
If not, however, they will have a lot to answer for. And in that scenario, Giuliani's public appearances will be retrospectively viewed as an early sign that even a skilled spin doctor couldn't save the president from himself.
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