A Rudy Awakening
“He’ll get his facts straight. There has been a lot of misinformation. I say, You know what? Learn before you speak. It’s a lot easier … When Rudy made the statements — Rudy is great — but Rudy had just started, and he wasn’t totally familiar with everything.” There has been a remarkable amount of turnover on the Trump team generally, and on his legal team specifically. After today’s presidential correction, Rudy Giuliani is on the clock.
+ Slate: Eleven—yes, 11!—different ways Giuliani implicated Trump and Cohen this week.
+ “How can it be that the Stormy Daniels payment has been the subject of public debate for months, and yet Trump’s defense team still hasn’t settled on how it is arranging the known facts? The reason is this: everyone around Trump sees his role as performing publicly on Trump’s behalf, to earn the big man’s fickle favor. A shared narrative, repeated with discipline, would guarantee that Trump would find the performance boring and look to someone more forceful and creative.” The New Yorker’s excellent Adam Davidson on how Rudy could have ended up on TV implicating the man he sought to please. To get there, we need to go back to Rudy’s days with Vincent (the Chin) Gigante in NYC and ask: What would the Chin make of this week’s madness? (Spoiler alert: Not much.)