It's time for another reading from the Chronicles of Presidential Lawyering. For a long time, the protagonist of the tale was Michael Cohen. Even before he could be heard discussing Playboy-model playoffs with the future president on tapes he recorded of his conversations with his own client, Cohen was regularly making a mess. But there's a new hero these days, and we're not talking about Martha's Vineyard pariah Alan Dershowitz.

Former New York Mayor and current aggravated tortoise in a suit-shell Rudy Giuliani has been tapped as President Trump's public-facing lawyer in the Russia probe—and, it seems, the president's growing list of porn-star- and Playboy-model-hush-money deals. Rudy joined Fox News Tuesday night to try to douse the flames of the Trump-Cohen tape that dropped on CNN shortly before. It was not a roaring success.

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Rudy: Believe me there were three other versions of this tape that were even worse. pic.twitter.com/ap0hlRuZQ8 — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 25, 2018

It doesn't seem like a good idea to suggest there are worse versions of the bad tape, even in some convoluted attempt to suggest the tape was deceptively edited. Giuliani was not particularly articulate in his phoned-in excuse-making, and the takeaway for the viewer was mostly that there are probably more bad tapes out there. Which, by recent revelations—which hold federal prosecutors have obtained 12 Cohen tapes in total—is a decent assumption.

There's also this:

You then make believe it says something it doesn't say.

This, from the same Rudy Giuliani who, in the lead-up to the tape's release—having heard it himself—lied outright and said it was Michael Cohen who used the word "cash." Somehow, Giuliani maintained in last night's interview that Trump didn't know about the payment.

But Rudy wasn't done. No, sir. Having left viewers with the lasting impression that, look, there are a bunch of bad tapes out there, he went on to explain that, look, the President of the United States isn't as bad as the mafia.

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Rudy: I’ve listened to lots of mafia tapes. I’ve dealt with much worse tapes than this. pic.twitter.com/TmfvpdBd6z — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 25, 2018

It's almost a waste of time at this point to point out that our expectations for the leader of our nation have maybe been lowered a bit. Not John Gotti is not the traditional bar for the president, but then again, the bar now sits somewhere in the earth's crust. Guiliani's take was even more piquant because there actually was plenty of mafiaspeak flying on the Trump-Cohen tape, particularly when Cohen told The Boss, "I need to open up a company for the transfer of all of that info regarding our friend David." Our Friend, with The Thing.

Of course, this all took place on Fox News, so no one batted an eye when the president's lawyer suggested this isn't the worst possible tape of the president, or that the tape we have isn't as bad as you'd hear from people involved in organized crime. In a normal country, this might be seen as bad lawyering in the court of public opinion. But in ours, this was normal. In a nation that has plunged down the rabbit hole into the rollicking depths of unreality, maybe it is.

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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