Rudy Giuliani and an Empty Bag of Cheez-Its

GIULIANI OUSTS DINKINS BY A THIN MARGIN, New York Times headline, November 1993

RUDY GIULIANI'S TUMBLE FROM 'AMERICA'S MAYOR' TO CRIMINAL DEFENDANT, New York Times headline, August 2023

It's so cliché but rings so true: "Oh how the mighty have fallen." Rudy Giuliani, 30 years ago, was at the pinnacle of power. Now, with only himself to blame, he has thudded to the bottom of the barrel.

“The 1993 race was a Giuliani-Dinkins rematch,” recalls Michael Musto, an out journalistic legend plugged into New York City nightlife, politics, and gossip both now and during Giuliani’s reign as mayor. “In the first race in 1989, Rudy called Dinkins 'a Jesse Jackson Democrat.' Jackson had used an anti-Semitic slur to characterize NYC. Rudy comparing the two at all seemed racist and facile.”

In both races, Musto adds, “Rudy concentrated on crime as an issue. His implication seemed to be that a Black mayor wouldn't solve crime problems, but he did this in subtle, coded ways. By this point, he had sharpened his campaign skills and wasn't above using some dirty tricks.”

In 1997, Giuliani beat Manhattan Borough President Ruth Messinger to easily win reelection. “Messinger thought he was being sexist by calling her ‘silly’ and a ‘far left-wing extremist,’ code words to demean a strong female,” Musto says. Because of term limits, Giuliani could not seek reelection in 2001, and in November of that year, he left office, after burnishing a stellar reputation after 9/11. Destined for success, Giuliani instead went to the dark side.

What people forget or least don’t know was that before 9/11, most people had tired of Giuliani’s bravado, narcissism, and infidelity. He was known as an uncompromising bully. To say that he was not well liked would be an understatement. He was downright vicious.

“One of the grossest things he ever did was hold a press conference to announce that he was separating from Donna Hanover [his second wife] — before he even told Donna!” Musto remembers. “It was shady and typically self-serving and heartless, and we all cheered when Hanover quickly had her own press conference, to talk about his adultery.”

“I got tipped that Rudy was cheating on his wife with Judith [Nathan]. Every Sunday, he and his mistress would check into a midtown hotel to snuggle up and watch The Sopranos. The revelation was far from shocking,” Musto discloses.

Then came 9/11, and while he helped pull the city up after the devastating attack, his stripes didn’t change. “We were all shocked when, after 9/11, he emerged, for a brief time, as a strong-seeming leader who helped guide us out of the horror,” says Musto. “His press conferences and speeches came off both tough and comforting as well as being informative, and we had to give him props for being a unifying light in the darkness.”

However, Musto adds, behind the scenes, he was “apparently up to shady stuff, as usual. That's the last time we had any respect for him, and since then, he has devolved lower and lower, to the point where he now comes off like a desperate bootlicker of a wannabe fascist, angling to hold on to power at any cost.”

America saw what Giuliani was all about when his campaign for president in 2008 completely fell apart. And while 99 percent of the people who helped put the city back on its feet refuse to talk about 9/11, make money off 9/11 or build their brand around 9/11, Giuliani, the lone 1 percent, was consumed with attaching himself to 9/11.,

He still gets off on being called “America’s Mayor.” Nowadays, that only comes from the MAGA crowd, because, by now, most people know that Rudy is just ... well, is "jerk" a better description than "loser"?

Giuliani is now a lot like he was in his famous scene in Borat: Subsequent Movie Film — sweating, choking, desperate for attention, flat on his back, his hands in … er … “empty pockets.” His lawyers say is struggling financially because of huge legal bills for defending Trump after the 2020 election. He was so desperate for cash that CNN reported he flew to Mar-a-Lago to beg Trump for payment, but only a fool — Giuliani in this case — would think that Trump would actually give a rat's ass about Rudy being mired in debt.

He is involved in a civil suit filed by Georgia vote counters Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss, and he admitted he lied about them “passing around USB ports like they were vials of heroin or cocaine.” In that case, he was ordered by a judge to pay nearly $90,000 in attorneys’ fees for refusing to provide discovery in the case against him by the two Georgia election workers.

There is another active defamation suit filed by Dominion Voting Systems against Giuliani and his accomplice, fellow “crackpot” attorney Sidney Powell. Giuliani’s law license is currently suspended — ya think? — and he is facing disbarment in New York and Washington, D.C.

As icing on the cake, Giuliani is an unindicted co-conspirator 1 in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 indictment, and he is an indicted co-conspirator 1 in Fulton County, Ga.’s massive indictment against Trump and his cronies.

There’s more trouble for Rudy, but honestly, why keep rehashing all his trials and tribulations? And while it's not good to wish ill on anyone, we can believe in the proverbial truth that karma can indeed be quite a bitch, so in this vein, Giuliani is finally getting his comeuppance.

What drives a man to be completely oblivious to his egregious and enigmatic behavior? Do you repeat lies so many times that “truth isn’t truth?” Do you dramatically see yourself as a character in a fictitious TV show or movie, perhaps like The Sopranos or My Cousin Vinny? Do you fancy yourself as indispensable in a world where men are disposable? Do you drive yourself so far into debt because you’ve lost all scruples and suddenly realize that $135,000 isn’t pocket change?

It's all the above.

Giuliani went from being the big cheese at the top of the heap to being an empty bag of Cheez-Its at the bottom of a landfill. And therein lies his problem — part of it. For a brief time, Giuliani was revered. He was a hero to the world. He hobnobbed with royalty. He was Time’s Person of the Year. People begged him to run for president.

And he could pick up the phone and call the president to get what he wanted, i.e. arranging a sweetheart deal for OxyContin maker Purdue Pharma.

When you reach the heights of infinity and end up in infamy, you only have yourself to blame. Being renowned the world over is like being addicted to OxyContin. You crave more, in bigger doses, trying to outdo yourself at every turn. And if you are not emotionally well, or you are unscrupulous, you can’t adjust to a lower altitude once that drug has been cut off.

Yes, this sounds like Trump, who is currently metaphorically still on OxyContin. But for his fellow addict, Giuliani, fame and fortune cracked. And he did too. He always would. Giuliani was depraved and deceitful. He would never adapt to being disposable.

He tried to cast himself onto the Trump Show, assuredly thinking he’d be back at the top of the world — as Secretary of State; yet, even Trump knew Rudy was unsavory, and pushed Giuliani down to the bottom of the barrel where truth is a long way from truth. The only way for Rudy to get a cameo in the Trump Show was to lie and cheat along with the rest of the bottom feeders; just another asinine acolyte and criminal around. The lowest common denominator of Trump's demographic.

Stupid is as stupid does. While all those around him were being burned by flying too close to Trump, Giuliani thought he could defy the odds.

Giuliani is now in the news again for all the wrong reasons, but at his core, Giuliani's reasoning was always wrong. As warped as this sounds, 9/11 was the best thing that ever happened to him. It shielded him from being exposed as a fraud. And his preoccupation with Trump merely allowed Giuliani’s fraudulence to come to the surface and shine.

In an interview with The New Yorker, Giuliani lamented and then laughed off his legacy. "I am afraid it will be on my gravestone. 'Rudy Giuliani: He lied for Trump. Somehow, I don't think that will be it. But, if it is, so what do I care? I’ll be dead."

It will be it, Rudy. You're stuck with it.

Suffice to say that an empty bag of Cheez-Its, at the bottom of a landfill, has a more dignified epitaph than Rudolph William Louis Giuliani.

John Casey is a senior editor at The Advocate.

Views expressed in The Advocate’s opinion articles are those of the writers and do not necessarily represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride.