At some point, it had to come back to bite Donald Trump, American president, that he struggles to attract anyone to work for him unless they lack ethics or competence or both. His current ambassador to the United Nations, for instance, is a Republican fundraiser with negligible diplomatic experience who once said there are many fine scientists on both sides when it comes to climate change. His Secretary of Education is another Republican big spender who knows zero about public education. And his personal "lawyer," Rudy Giuliani, is actually more of a rodeo clown who runs in to get kicked in the face every time the bull starts bucking too hard under the president. But as of this fine Wednesday morning, it looks like The Artist Formerly Known as America's Mayor might take more than a beating for the president. He might be in some serious legal peril.

In Trumpland, after all, you either leave diminished or stay long enough to go to jail. Everyone who wanders into this president's airspace enters an escalating state of ethical and professional decay. And based on Giuliani's conduct over the last 24 hours or so—the climax of months of shady, unscrupulous shit hitting the fan—he may well believe the double-decker bus has swung around the corner and someone just shoved him into the street.

A new report from the Washington Post, which has nailed the Ukraine story throughout, centers Giuliani in a caper wherein the State Department and other official channels were shoved aside so that the Presidential Lawyer could get up to...something...in Ukraine. Actually, we know what the something was: both Trump and Giuliani have openly admitted they pressured the president of Ukraine to open an investigation that could damage Joe Biden. This is the offense that led Nancy Pelosi to—finally—open an impeachment inquiry Tuesday. Anyway, here's the Post:

...the person who appears to have been more directly involved at nearly every stage of the entanglement with Ukraine is Giuliani.

“Rudy—he did all of this,” one U.S. official said. “This s---show that we’re in—it’s him injecting himself into the process.”

Giuliani will soon learn that you either leave Trumpland diminished or with a knife in your back. Drew Angerer Getty Images

Several officials traced their initial concerns about the path of U.S.-Ukrainian relations to news reports and interviews granted by Giuliani in which he began to espouse views and concerns that did not appear connected to U.S. priorities or policy.

The former New York mayor appears to have seen Zelensky, a political neophyte elected president of Ukraine in April and sworn in in May, as a potential ally on two political fronts: punishing those Giuliani suspected of playing a role in exposing the Ukraine-related corruption of former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort, and delivering political ammunition against Biden.

As Josh Marshall pointed out, the Manafort detail points to this being more than just Giuliani's work. What does Giuliani care about Manafort? It's Trump who cares about Manafort. Maybe he wanted something that would muddy the waters around his former campaign manager's activities in Ukraine, perhaps just enough to justify pardoning him. That would be commensurate reward for Manafort's refusal to "break" and properly cooperate with federal prosecutors. (Remember when the President of the Untied States used mob lingo to describe his campaign manager's Very Loyal activities?) Either way, there's ample reason to believe the president has been directly implicated in this from the beginning.

But the whole WaPo report centers on Giuliani's role, and based on his appearances across Fox News' many fine offerings last night and this morning, he's aware of his new status as a protagonist in the story of an impeachable offense. Vox's Aaron Rupar traced Giuliani's merry dance across cable news and, we can only assume, his dark internal journey into the cavernous depths of delusion required to survive working on the president's behalf. First, he joined the program hosted by Laura Ingraham, who lives in fear of The Children who want a habitable planet.

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Rudy Giuliani is losing it. This is Infowars-type stuff. pic.twitter.com/qMlKLX74Sa — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2019

Wow! This is fucking nuts! But the real peach was in there at the end: "The reality is," Giuliani said, ranting over Ingraham, "that Joe Biden actually, may have very well committed something called...crimes."

Later, he addressed head-on the report from WaPo that he'd circumvented official State Department channels to do his thing over there:

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Wow. Here's Rudy Giuliani throwing the State Department under the bus and saying State officials called him and asked him to get involved in Ukraine. pic.twitter.com/HIhQDmhzjh — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2019

Ah! He held up his phone's home screen. Case closed, particularly because Trump and his team are known for their steadfast honesty. In this formulation, the diplomats at State called up Ol' Rudy to do a secret agent mission in Kiev—there was no one else available with the requisite skills or debonaire sophistication—and he reported everything back for the official record. Totally above-board. Shaken, not stirred. You can tell because later, America's Mayor started ranting about George Soros.

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Rudy is pushing Illuminati-style conspiracy theories about [spins wheel] George Soros pic.twitter.com/VR80bwl8Mt — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2019

Jesus Christ, man. This guy was once the favorite for the Republican presidential nomination. Actually, with the benefit of very depressing hindsight, it all adds up.

But he wasn't done. He popped up later on the Laura Ingraham Afraid of the Kids Program to join a panel and scream at another panelist:

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LOL! Rudy Giuliani made a guest appearance later during Ingraham's show and immediately started calling a co-panelist "an idiot" and yelling at him to "shut up." pic.twitter.com/Mh2LbJXuaT — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2019

This is what innocence looks like, folks. It was also on display at 1:23 a.m., not too long after the Presidential Lawyer departed the Fox News premises, when he took to Twitter to perform some InfoWars Mad Libs.

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We know corrupt Ukrainian oligarch laundered $3 million to the Biden Family. But $3 to $4m more was laundered to Biden. So release all the financial records of all businesses involving Biden, Kerry’s stepson and notorious mobster Whitey Bulger’s nephew. — Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) September 25, 2019

To think we used to call ourselves an Exceptional country. Now, the former mayor of our largest city, lately purported to be a "lawyer" for our president, is on Twitter rattling off the names of Democrats and famous baddies, hoping it will stick. By lunch he'll be demanding an investigation into the relationship between Jack Kennedy and the Loch Ness Monster.



But wait—there's more. Giuliani returned to the airwaves this fine Wednesday morning to debut a new line of obvious bullshit.

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Rudy Giuliani's new talking point this morning is that the president of Ukraine just wanted to investigate Biden on his own and Trump didn't even have to push him pic.twitter.com/5TZ9TgXGuV — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2019

It's too late, Rudy. You already admitted on television that you pressured the Ukrainians to ensnare the Bidens in an investigation. The president already admitted he pressured his Ukrainian counterpart to do so. Saying, maybe the Ukrainian president brought it up, then laughing maniacally, is not as clever as you seem to think. Maybe you should get some sleep. What this does indicate is that Giuliani knows he may be very, very screwed—not least because El Jefe will not hesitate to sacrifice him to save the presidential behind.

Elsewhere on Fox and Friends, Giuliani tried to somehow make this about Obama and even the three geniuses were not impressed. And then there was this:

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Here is Rudy Giuliani, who is not a government official, saying on Fox & Friends that the transcript of Trump's call to president of Ukraine -- one that's at the heart of a whistleblower complaint -- was read to him. Congress still hasn't been able to see it. pic.twitter.com/CpioFcAsqX — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 25, 2019

Why did Giuliani get a look at The Transcript before Congress and the general public? He is not, as Rupar points out, a government official of any kind. The transcript is not actually a full, verbatim transcript of the call—it features ellipses at key points—but it still turned out to be more damning than anyone expected. The president did exactly what he said he did, and what Giuliani denied he did on Fox News: he brought up the potential investigation and pressured the Ukrainian president over it. There is no reason to believe this is the end of it, either, just as there is zero reason to believe Giuliani was actually on a Double-Secret State Department Mission in Ukraine because he held up his iPhone on television. What would the full transcript say? What does the whistleblower's report say?

Giuliani is now lying and spouting off conspiracy theories to try to stay out of the fire, but you've got to believe Trump will shove him the rest of the way in if necessary. That might be just desserts for a small man who was always graded on a curve, but Trump must be held accountable for his role here as well. This can't be just another fall-guy scenario.

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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