Rudy Giuliani served as the public face of President Donald Trump‘s legal team during the Mueller investigation, which sometimes led Giuliani to make things worse. Now, Giuliani wants to transition into a freelancing, attack dog for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.
“We’ll see where they have holes and where they need help,” Giuliani said in an interview with Politico. “I’m available to do a lot of it.” Even though Giuliani’s drawbacks may include the occasional gaffe, the president sees Giuliani as a peer with decades of political experience and has gained credit for helping Trump through the Mueller investigation. Giuliani is also a soothing presence for the ill-tempered Trump. The president he even endearingly refers to him as “My Rudy,” according to Politico.
A unnamed Trump campaign advisor said that the calming effect could be key. “The president is most effective when he’s in a great mood and he’s having fun on the campaign trial, and Rudy adds to that … I think he has the potential to be very effective in certain circumstances. He also has the potential to be unhelpful at times.”
One of those unhelpful times could be when Giuliani didn’t exactly align with Trump’s messaging attacking former Vice President Joe Biden for his authorship of the 1994 Crime Bill. Rudy Giuliani served as the public face of President Donald Trump‘s legal team during the Mueller investigation, which sometimes led Giuliani to make things worse. Now, Giuliani wants to transition into a freelancing, attack dog for Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign.
But the former New York City mayor recently tweeted his personal support of that same bill:
These kinds of PR mishaps are part of what has given some Trump insiders headaches. One White House staffer told Politico in January that “handling Rudy’s f-ups takes more than one man.” Giuliani dismissed the complaints of his performance as a Trump surrogate. “They just do it behind my back,” he said.
Michael Caputo, a former 2016 political advisor for Trump, said he believes Giuliani could be “surrogate No. 1” for Trump after his family and Vice President Mike Pence.
“Because so many people realize the vital role he played in defending the president through the Russia hoax, I think his surrogacy would appeal across the entire base,” Caputo said. “And I think everybody wants to hear from him. In fact, I can’t think of one demographic in the column of the president that would not want to hear from him.”
It seems that Giuliani might have already started working on the 2020 election. Giuliani planned a trip to Ukraine in which he was hoping to find evidence that Biden illegally influenced the firing of former Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin to punish Shokin for investigating a energy company that Biden’s son, Hunter Biden, had worked for. Biden denied any wrongdoing and was unhappy with the former mayor.
“I can’t remember any lawyer representing the president, conferring with the president, deciding to go overseas, where a government relies on U.S. largesse to try to get them to do something that everybody knows never happened,” Biden said.
[Image via Don Emmert AFP/Getty Images.]
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