Rudy Giuliani exits the stage after speaking last month at the Republican National Convention. PHOTOGRAPH BY BRIAN VAN DER BRUG / LOS ANGELES TIMES / GETTY

There was a moment during Rudolph Giuliani’s extended exchange with Chris Cuomo, on CNN, last Thursday morning when the former mayor had the look of a man posing for a portrait to be titled, simply, “After.” The “Before” could’ve been taken at nearly any moment prior to Giuliani’s endorsement of Donald Trump, his near-deafening Convention speech in Cleveland, or the frantic grasping for relevance that has defined his recent public presence. Trump’s campaign has compromised so many prominent conservatives—particularly the troika of Reince Priebus, Mitch McConnell, and Paul Ryan—that it’s almost possible to overlook the way it has initiated the grim denouement of Giuliani’s career. “After” began at the precise moment that Giuliani, a man whose own political career was marked by a defense of undocumented immigrants, hitched his political fortunes to the most prominent xenophobe in recent American history.

Giuliani has never been a figure of lasting adoration. During his time as the mayor of New York City, between 1994 and 2001, he displayed a level of abrasiveness that even New Yorkers found difficult to bear. His political fortunes were pegged to competence, not charisma. His reflexive tendency to defend police—a product of his previous career as a prosecutor—also made him blind to all but the worst instances of police misconduct. (This included a 1992 police rally Giuliani addressed at which officers referred to David Dinkins, then the mayor, as a “nigger,” and held signs depicting him as a bathroom attendant.)

Giuliani’s public reputation changed on September 11th, when his composure and seeming ubiquity in the face of catastrophe made him, in the words of the Times, “the Giuliani we wanted.” His visibility provided a sharp contrast with George W. Bush, who was scarcely seen in the immediate aftermath of the attack. For the first time since his prosecutions of Mafia bosses as U.S. Attorney, in the eighties, Giuliani was broadly perceived as heroic, possibly even Presidential. In one of the less-recalled events during the aftermath of 9/11, Giuliani publicly rejected the idea that Muslims or people of Arab descent should be held responsible for the attacks. Two days after the attacks, in response to word that people of Arab descent were being targeted and harassed, he said, "Nobody should attack anybody else. That's what we're dealing with, right now. We are dealing with insanity, with sick hatred.''

Throughout Giuliani’s time as mayor, his critics derided him as a right-wing authoritarian, but he was only moderately conservative. He favored gun control and gay rights. And, most notably, he defended the rights of undocumented immigrants. In 1994, California passed Proposition 187, a measure that restricted undocumented immigrants’ access to public education and emergency services in the state. When Governor Pete Wilson visited New York the next year, during his Presidential bid, Giuliani denounced the measure as “inhumane.” In 1996, he went further, telling the Times, “The anti-immigration issue that’s now sweeping the country in my view is no different than the movements that swept the country in the past.” He added, “You look back at the Chinese Exclusionary Act, or the Know-Nothing movement—these were movements that encouraged Americans to fear foreigners, to fear something that is different, and to stop immigration.”

In 2008, Giuliani’s bid for the Presidency immolated amid poor strategy and futile attempts to refresh a fading recollection of heroics from seven years earlier. (Joe Biden famously diagrammed Giuliani’s campaign rhetoric, saying his sentences consisted entirely of a noun, a verb, and a reference to 9/11.) Giuliani pivoted on the issue of immigration when he began his Presidential bid, emphasizing the importance of legal entry into the country. But even then he both opposed mass deportation and supported eventual citizenship for those who paid taxes.

Contrast that with Trump’s doctrine of collective responsibility that led him to claim repeatedly that Muslims know about terrorist attacks before they happen but refuse to do anything to stop them. Last fall, when Trump lied about seeing “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheering the collapse of the World Trade Center, Giuliani responded by pointing out that he’d neither seen nor heard of anything of the sort. His relationship to Trump began to change as the mogul became the leading contender for the Republican nomination. In December, Giuliani rejected Trump’s proposed ban on Muslim immigration, calling it a violation of the First Amendment with “no reasonable basis” for enactment. But in May, when Trump proposed that he would appoint Giuliani to a task force on radical Islam, one that would presumably play a role in registering Muslims and enforcing Trump’s immigration ban, the former mayor praised the commission as “a good step” and left open the possibility that he would lead it.

In recent months, he has been called upon to defend Trump’s fabulist allegation that Barack Obama founded ISIS and Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns. At the Republican Convention last month, he cosigned Trump’s fascistic vision of national safety. The parade of G.O.P. elected officials huddling around Trump’s lamp in Cleveland made political sense, even if it required a kind of craven, selfish logic to understand. Trump was more popular than many of those figures in their home states or congressional districts. Few were eager to suffer self-inflicted wounds, no matter how egregious, unqualified, and dangerous the nominee. Giuliani’s route to Trumpism is not as transparent. He has no constituency to please, no real concern with backlash or access to reëlection funds should he buck the Republican National Committee hierarchy. But like Newt Gingrich, another sunsetting Republican stalwart, Giuliani sees Trump as his route back to relevance. Before Trumpism became a political force, Giuliani was most commonly seen as a Fox News crank summoned to remind the network’s viewers why Black Lives Matter is wrong.

Thus you found Giuliani sitting across from Cuomo, giving a memorable portrayal of a man who almost believes the words coming out of his own mouth. On Monday, he went even further, apparently forgetting the timing of 9/11, and declared that, during the eight years of the Bush Administration, “We didn’t have any successful radical-Islamic terrorist attack in the United States.” They had, he argued, started under Obama. No matter what happens in November, we’re all but assured a raft of studies on the cultural dynamics that produced Trumpism. Almost certainly a part of its appeal—as with most mass movements, but particularly fascistic ones—is its ability to add meaning to the lives of its adherents. And improbably, pathetically, one of those lives belongs to the former mayor of New York City.