Rudy Giuliani’s daughter published a style essay in Vanity Fair on Thursday calling on Americans to vote for Democratic Party presidential nominee and former vice president Joe Biden–casting the endorsement decision not so much as a celebration of Biden’s policies but as a timely, crucial and necessary repudiation of President Donald Trump.
“To anyone who feels overwhelmed or apathetic about this election, there is nothing I relate to more than desperation to escape corrosive political discourse,” Caroline Rose Giuliani writes. “As a child, I saw firsthand the kind of cruel, selfish politics that Donald Trump has now inflicted on our country. It made me want to run as far away from them as possible. But trust me when I tell you: Running away does not solve the problem. We have to stand and fight. The only way to end this nightmare is to vote. There is hope on the horizon, but we’ll only grasp it if we elect Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.”
Describing herself as a “filmmaker in the LGBTQ+ community who tells stories about mental health, sexuality, and other stigmatized issues,” the admittedly privileged daughter of New York City’s former mayor also endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. This time around, however, the younger Giuliani is making her electoral plea a bit more personal:
Around the age of 12, I would occasionally get into debates with my father, probably before I was emotionally equipped to handle such carnage. It was disheartening to feel how little power I had to change his mind, no matter how logical and above-my-pay-grade my arguments were. He always found a way to justify his party line, whatever it was at the time. Even though he was considered socially moderate for a Republican back in the day, we still often butted heads. When I tried to explain my belief that you don’t get to be considered benevolent on LGBTQ+ rights just because you have gay friends but don’t support gay marriage, I distinctly remember him firing back with an intensity fit for an opposing politican [sic] rather than one’s child.
The author went on to note that she’s wealthy and isn’t sharing her personal anecdotes about her dad to complain–in fact she makes an effort to thank the heavens that she didn’t grow up like most people–or elicit sympathy but “to illustrate one of the many reasons I have a fraught relationship with politics, like so many of us do.”
All that said, the heiress-to-be later implicates her father as culpable for and complicit in enabling some of the 45th president’s Bond villain-style excesses and injustices.
“Trump and his enablers have used his presidency to stoke the injustice that already permeated our society, taking it to dramatically new, Bond-villain heights,” she wrote
A later section made the point clearer:
If being the daughter of a polarizing mayor who became the president’s personal bulldog has taught me anything, it is that corruption starts with “yes-men” and women, the cronies who create an echo chamber of lies and subservience to maintain their proximity to power. We’ve seen this ad nauseam with Trump and his cadre of high-level sycophants (the ones who weren’t convicted, anyway).
The elder Giuliani, of course, is the president’s unpaid attorney, longtime friend and occasional political advisor. He has remained a fixture of the current administration’s scandals–up to and including the current controversy over the provenance of a Delaware laptop that may have once belonged to Hunter Biden.
[image via Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images]
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