“Excuse me, when you look at Stormy Daniels,” Rudolph Giuliani, who is somehow a key member of the legal team of the President of the United States, said on Wednesday, in an onstage interview at the Globes Capital Market Conference, in Tel Aviv, before interrupting himself to make a face. And what a face: Giuliani’s expression was, perhaps, meant to be one of knowing revulsion at Daniels, but the lopsided chaos of his features conveyed a moral contortion all his own. He had been explaining that Melania Trump believed in her husband implicitly, and so should everyone else, because he was Trump, and because Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, acted in adult films.

Ignoring the interviewer’s plea of “Let’s respect her,” Giuliani added, “I know Donald Trump. Look at his three wives, right?” It wasn’t clear if, with that questioning note, he was looking for a confirmation of the exact number of Trump’s wives. “Beautiful women, classy women, women of great substance. Stormy Daniels?” He paused to make another face, putting the left side of his mouth on a Cubist collision with his glasses. Then Giuliani, a former U.S. Attorney and mayor of New York City, began talking about his standards for respectability.

“I respect all human beings. I even have to respect, you know, criminals”—a quality that may come in handy if Giuliani stays in Trump’s circle, as the investigation by the special counsel, Robert Mueller, along with others, progresses. “But I’m sorry, I don’t respect a porn star the way I respect a career woman, or a woman of substance, or a woman who has great respect for herself as a woman, and as a person. And isn’t going to sell her body for sexual exploitation. So, Stormy, you want to bring a case? Let me cross-examine you.”

Clifford, in fact, seems to be doing fine on the self-respect front. She worked in adult films, then moved on to directing them—a “legitimate and legal, I’d like to point out, career that I’ve worked very hard to establish,” as she described it on “60 Minutes.” She is proud to have succeeded at it. It is more of an honest living than some New York real-estate developers make. Her profession shouldn’t mean that she ought to be automatically distrusted, let alone attacked with impunity. But she has also made it clear that she knew that she was taking a risk by opening herself up to this kind of attack—something that can demand integrity and courage. (Clifford has said that one of the new expenses she has taken on, in addition to her legal fees, is for security.) And Giuliani jumped in, seemingly intent on playacting the role of a beat cop from a past century, who, in dealing with the woman who comes to tell him her story, looks at what she is wearing, smirks, and turns away—or, as Giuliani suggested in his “cross-examine” remark, the role of the lawyer who has no better tactic than to try to humiliate a witness, labelling her a loose woman. That is a form of sexual exploitation far more corrosive than any film that Clifford has ever made.

But Giuliani’s comments went beyond whether Clifford could be believed to whether she could even be hurt. “Explain to me how she could be damaged,” he said. “She has no reputation. If you’re going to sell your body for money, you just don’t have a reputation.” But Clifford does not say that Trump, against whom she has filed a defamation suit (in the Southern District of New York, Giuliani’s old territory), damaged her by calling her an adult-film star. She says that he damaged her by saying, on Twitter, that her account of being threatened not to talk about their sexual encounter was “a total con job”—and that she, by implication, was a total con woman, conspiring to sabotage the project to Make America Great Again. On Thursday morning, when NBC asked Giuliani whether he regretted his remarks, he said that he did not, dressing up his denial with a vague reference to feminism and daughters. He also said, “I don’t have to undermine her credibility. She’s done it by lying.”

And where to begin with the matter of Trump’s credibility in the Clifford case? Another of his lawyers, Michael Cohen, whose legal problems are legion, paid her a hundred and thirty thousand dollars as part of a poorly drafted hush agreement, the paperwork for which Trump never got around to signing. Clifford also, on Wednesday, filed a suit in California against the lawyer who ostensibly represented her in that matter, Keith Davidson, saying that he had breached his fiduciary duty to her by being a “puppet” for Trump and violating their attorney-client privilege. There have been multiple conflicting accounts, from Trump and his lawyers, of where the hundred and thirty thousand dollars came from, and of what the President knew about the agreement. In addition, the shell company that Cohen set up to pay Clifford was also used as the receptacle for payments from corporations, including A.T. & T. and Novartis, that wanted Cohen’s “help” on various policy issues related to the Trump Administration and to their own business interests. The revelation of those payments—spurred by Michael Avenatti, Clifford’s current lawyer, who, in response to Giuliani’s latest comments, called him a “pig”—was an embarrassment to the companies involved, leading to high-level resignations. As I’ve written before, Giuliani, perhaps more than any of Trump’s other lawyers, has made Cohen sound like Trump’s bag man, with slush-fund-management responsibilities.

At the Tel Aviv conference, Giuliani also said that Trump’s North Korea summit was on again for next week, because “Kim Jong Un got back on his hands and knees and begged for it”; that the corruption case against Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s Prime Minister, was a “joke”; and that Mueller’s team was trying to “frame” Trump. Last weekend, Giuliani told HuffPost that, while the President could be impeached, “in no case” could he be indicted or subpoenaed, not even “if he shot James Comey.” There is regular speculation about when Trump might fire Giuliani. But it may be that Giuliani is the President’s lawyer because he is the kind of lawyer Trump likes.

Against this backdrop, Giuliani’s remarks about Clifford are more than repugnant; they are revealing. They convey a political philosophy that he and the President share, which can be summed up as: those who are vulnerable are meant to be wounded, and have no right to ask for respect, let alone protection. It is a bully’s declaration of open season on the weak. But Stephanie Clifford is not as defenseless as Giuliani or Trump might think. She has presented a credible and strikingly strong legal case. Maybe Giuliani should be listening to her.