You'd be hard-pressed to find a more embarrassing caricature than Rudy Giuliani these days. While his claim to the throne as "America's Mayor" was always tenuous, he has plummeted to unseen depths in his new role saying insane shit on cable news to confuse people about the various criminal investigations into Donald Trump, American president. Giuliani's stock has fallen so precipitously that the former New York mayor was recently found at Yankee Stadium getting raucously booed by the home fans when the stadium announcer tried to wish him a happy birthday.

Anyway, Rudy's been busy these last few months. Late last year, he embarked on some eye-popping divorce proceedings in which we learned he'd spent $12,000 on cigars in the space of a few months. (Giuliani split from his third wife, Judith, after he was caught cheating with another woman—a somewhat fitting conclusion to a romance that began with Giuliani stepping out on his second wife with Judith. Giuliani's first wife was also his second cousin.) In December, he deployed some of the "cyber expertise" he peddled at his security firm to declare someone "invaded" one of his tweets to insert a link. In reality, he had failed to put a space after a period, creating a link, and someone bought the resulting URL only to plaster "Donald Trump is a traitor to our country" on the landing page. Giuliani left the original tweet up, letting people continue to click through to this message, presumably as evidence he'd been invaded.

It’s almost beginning to seem like Rudy Giuliani will do anything for money and attention. Getty Images

But the more standard Rude Boy fare is going on CNN to have incomprehensible conversations with Chris Cuomo. The obvious intent is to so muddy the waters around the various probes into pretty much every organization Donald Trump has ever run in an attempt to prevent the American public from grasping just how deep the corruption goes. Except Giuliani has lost a step or four over the years, and sometimes he just blurts out some wild stuff that does his patron no good. After all, Giuliani once spilled that Trump repaid Michael Cohen for his hush money payment to Stormy Daniels after Trump had repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the transaction.

And last night, Giuliani brought this:

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GIULIANI: "You want me to make a moral judgement about it?... if we can impeach based on moral judgments, everybody in the US Congress would have to get impeached." pic.twitter.com/92IrbnphnS — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) April 19, 2019

What, so now we want the most powerful people in our society to have morals? What's next, you want public officials to abstain from monetizing their office and make decisions in the public interest? The theater as Giuliani audibly dropped his pen in absolute SHOCK! that we might demand some level of ethical behavior from the President of the United States really makes this. We elected the president to lie to us and grift, Chris, not to have morals!

Funny enough, Giuliani's newest disgraceful display is a useful window into the strategy here. He can't defend what Trump actually did, so he tries to change the conversation. From the moment The Barr Letter dropped, Donald Trump and his allies—along with leftist journalists on the anti-anti-Russia beat—have sought to make everything a binary choice. Either the president is indicted for a felony, or he's COMPLETELY EXONERATED and it was all a hoax. Either he's a Manchurian Candidate getting direct orders from Vladimir Putin, or he's an upstanding servant to the American people with no connections to Russia.

The reality, of course, was always likely to be in between. We know now that Trump has an extensive record of—to be kind—running organizations on the razor's edge of the law, and that he knows how to avoid personal accountability for...everything. He lives in the gray area favored by most white-collar criminals, who feast on loopholes and baroque questions of prior knowledge and intent to avoid prosecution. If you examine his behavior as a binary choice between "illegal beyond a reasonable doubt" and "innocent," he will escape once again. If you examine his behavior as savagely unethical and in breach of his oath to protect the Constitution of the United States, you can easily see why Congress must begin impeachment hearings.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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