The former New York mayor won acclaim for his dignified response to 9/11 but his intemperate attacks as the Republican nominee’s surrogate have deep roots

He is out-Trumping Trump. He ranted and raved at the Republican national convention, spread wild rumours about Hillary Clinton’s health and appeared to attack her for her gender, and described Donald Trump’s exploitation of the tax code as “genius”. And when reminded that he has marital infidelities in his past, he replied: “Everybody does.”

That it should come to this for the man once hailed as “America’s mayor”.

Rudy Giuliani was the face of New York on 11 September 2001. He braved the scene of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and walked two miles with head and shoulders caked in white ash. He lost friends, urged tolerance and captured the mood in a way that eluded President George W Bush when he said: “The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately.”

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The shift from America’s mayor to Trump’s attack dog has led some commentators to suggest that Giuliani is at risk of betraying his legacy. “What Has Happened to Rudy Giuliani?” asked a headline on the Slate website. “He used to be a pragmatic moderate. Now he’s spewing nonsense.”

But this is not a simple narrative of hero-turned-crackpot. From another perspective, Giuliani is merely reverting to his old self, albeit in more extreme form, and 9/11 was the exception that proves the rule. Under the headline, “Is Rudy Giuliani Losing His Mind?”, the Politico website argued: “Even in New York, ‘America’s Mayor’ was always a lot more like Trump than people realized. Now we’re seeing it on a national stage.”



Now 72, his antics in recent months have caused consternation, as he seemingly tries to achieve the impossible by being like Trump only more so. At the convention in Cleveland he roared, waved his arms theatrically and proclaimed that Trump loves “all people, from the top to the bottom”.

Lambasting Clinton, against whom he holds a grudge, he has accused the media of ignoring “several signs of illness by her”. He described Trump’s pitch to African Americans in Milwaukee as “the best speech that any Republican, at the least, has ever given”.

Last week he claimed that Trump beat Clinton in the first debate and told an interviewer that the Democrat is “too stupid to be president”, because of her defence of Bill Clinton’s extramarital cheating.

Then, on last Sunday’s political TV shows, he reacted to the report that Trump declared a $916m loss on his 1995 income tax returns, which could have allowed him to legally avoid paying any taxes for up to 18 years. “The man’s a genius,” Giuliani said on Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “He knows how to operate the tax code for the people that he’s serving.”

Over on NBC’s Meet the Press, host Chuck Todd asked Giuliani if he was “the right person” to bring up Bill Clinton’s past infidelities. “You have your own infidelities, sir,” Todd said.

Giuliani shot back: “Everybody does. You know, I’m a Roman Catholic and I confess those things to my priest.”

On ABC, he asked: “Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump embraces Rudy Giuliani at a campaign rally in Greenville, North Carolina. Photograph: Mike Segar/Reuters

All of which fuelled a perception that the former mayor is losing the plot and becoming increasingly unhinged. Rich Galen, a Republican strategist and former press secretary to Dan Quayle, said: “I think he’s gone off the rails. I hadn’t paid much attention until his shrieking at the Republican convention. He’s like the guitarist in This Is Spinal Tap going up to 11, except he’s going up to 12.”

Galen added: “He was always pretty brash but this is a different level of disconnect. Calling Trump a ‘genius’ for losing $900m a year: I don’t understand how you ever get to that point.”

The reality is that, before 9/11, Giuliani was already a troubled individual with a suspect record. In 1992, as a mayoral candidate, he egged on thousands of predominantly white off-duty police officers in a huge New York riot that saw innocent people attacked, property vandalised and city hall occupied. Giuliani reportedly stood on top of a car while denouncing Mayor David Dinkins, an African American, through a bullhorn.

He succeeded Dinkins in 1994. Violent crime dropped by 56% during the eight years he served as mayor, although it had begun falling three years before he took office and reflected a wider trend in big cities across the country. There were also consequences to Giuliani’s tough-on-crime approach.

In 1999, Amadou Diallo, an unarmed immigrant from Guinea, was shot 41 times by police while reaching for his wallet. A year later, Patrick Dorismond, an unarmed 26-year-old security guard, was shot dead after a brief struggle outside a cocktail bar; Giuliani attacked Dorismond’s reputation and released part of his juvenile police record, as if to imply that he got his just desserts.

Like Trump, Giuliani has been married three times and has a chequered personal life. In 2000, following an affair, he told the media before his wife that he would seek a separation from her.

An article on Politico last month contended: “It might seem like this summer has marked a sad break with that old Rudy, or proved him a sellout. But if you’ve followed Giuliani’s career, in fact it’s clear he swallowed the whole Trump persona many years ago – the race-baiting, the law-and-order pose, the incessant lying used to both steal credit and avoid responsibility.

“What we’re seeing this summer isn’t a crackup: It’s the inevitable, supernova explosion of what long ago became one of the most toxic and overrated political careers in our history.”

If he was speaking on behalf of a conventional candidate, such behaviour could be severely damaging. With Trump, however, it is all of a piece. Lanhee Chen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, said: “I don’t know if he’s hurting anything because he’s not saying anything more outlandish than the nominee himself. If the nominee was Mitt Romney, it would be a problem because it would be a surrogate gone rogue.”

He added: “In 2012 he was a good surrogate, as far as I can tell, and we can continue to admire him for his work on 9/11. I’m not sure who the real Rudy Giuliani is.”