All right, let's talk about the new Rudy Giuliani profile in New York Magazine.
The big news out of it, of course, is that Donald Trump’s brilliant legal defender apparently did an entire interview with his fly unzipped. I kid: It's actually that the nation's top cybersecurity expert can't work Siri, leaves his phones unlocked and the screens in view as he goes about his day, and managed to accidentally leave one of those three phones in the hands of his interviewer at the end of the day. Ha, I'm kidding again. I'm a card.
No, it was his bit explaining that former Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was secretly "controlled" by Jewish billionaire and pro-democracy advocate George Soros.
“He put all four ambassadors there. And he’s employing the FBI agents.” I told him he sounded crazy, but he insisted he wasn’t.
“Don’t tell me I’m anti-Semitic if I oppose him,” he said. “Soros is hardly a Jew. I’m more of a Jew than Soros is. I probably know more about — he doesn’t go to church, he doesn’t go to religion — synagogue. He doesn’t belong to a synagogue, he doesn’t support Israel, he’s an enemy of Israel. He’s elected eight anarchist DA’s in the United States. He’s a horrible human being.”
So somewhere along the line, the man the media dubbed "America's Mayor" turned into a pamphleteering neo-Nazi from the bowels of the internet, and nobody, not a one of us, is even remotely surprised.
What we get from the rest of Rudy's Day Off is a good picture of yet another someone in Trump's orbit who is so absolutely convinced of their own brilliance that they are eager, positively eager, to describe their master plans to anyone who will listen. Giuliani makes movie hero villains finally believable, as they diagram and flowchart their world domination schemes for the benefit of the recently captured and sure-to-escape-again hero. I am so beyond your understanding of the world, the man might burp over his second Bloody Mary, that your petty laws cannot contain me.
So we learn that he used one fallen-through deal to learn about Ukraine's money laundering system, in an effort to see if Hunter Biden could be tied to it. We get told that the prosecutors in the Southern District of New York are "assholes" and "idiots" and "a Trump-deranged bunch of silly New York Liberals" if they really are looking into whether he has been Doing Crimes. "I've been doing this for 50 years. I know how not to commit crimes," Rudy boasts. (Unless I am misremembering, I recall Trump campaign chair Paul Manafort had custom towels made with those printed sentiments.)
And we learn that he is not yet ready to cut loose from now-indicted Russian money-funnelers Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman because they may have been charged with crimes, but neither have been convicted of those crimes. "And that's generally my cutoff point." Because hey, you can’t throw a smartphone 10 feet, in Rudy’s circles, without hitting someone merely accused of international crimes.
Again, though, the majority of it is a man bragging about a brilliance so unstoppable that it doesn't matter if he tells you his next moves in advance or not. How to discredit the witness to the phone call between Donald Trump and Trump's ally Gordon Sondland: "How do we know he isn't a paranoid schizophrenic. How do we know he isn't an alcoholic?" How to get under the skin of witnesses in a theoretical Senate impeachment trial: "Biden, for example, is extraordinarily sensitive about his intellect."
The only thing that could stop him, Giuliani also seems far, far too eager to tell his interviewer, is the secret plotters against him. You know: everybody. Every last person who has been criticizing him, all in cahoots, all working together. They are all "anti-Trump" people; his once-friends are now conspirators against him, looking to discredit him and Dear Leader both, and behind a good chunk of it is George Soros, the bogeyman of the white supremacist who is right now claimed by every ragged racist in every corner of conservatism to be the controller behind everything from worldwide immigration patterns to, yes, the FBI.
At this point, it might behoove us to remember the words of mental health expert Dr. Bandy Lee, who warned of "a common phenomenon that happens when you are continually exposed to a severely compromised person without appropriate intervention. You start taking on the person’s symptoms in a phenomenon called 'shared psychosis.'"
Don't think of it necessarily in the context of Donald Trump, however. Think back farther than that. Think back to the Fox News programs that popularized the Soros conspiracies Rudy Giuliani is now basing his strategies, beliefs, and soon-to-be-defense around. The Glenn Beck days.
Yeah. That.
