“You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become the villain,” Harvey Dent, the heroic district attorney of Gotham, proclaims in “The Dark Knight.” The fatalistic idea being that one can only do so much good in the world before you start evening out the scales with evil. Dent goes on to become the villain Two-Face.
Rudolph W. Giuliani — the former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York and former mayor of New York, the city Gotham was based on — might have pondered that a bit.
If Giuliani had passed from the scene after 9/11, schools and bridges would be named after him today. George Will once proclaimed that Giuliani’s years as mayor “constitute perhaps America’s most transformative conservative governance in the last half-century.” After his handling of New York’s response to the 9/11 attacks, he was proclaimed “America’s mayor.” Time named him Person of the Year. Queen Elizabeth made him an honorary knight.
But now he’s a different kind of dark knight. Instead of donning a cape to crusade against crime, he beclowns not just himself but the president he sycophantly serves.
As President Trump’s personal lawyer, Giuliani helped the president get impeached — twice. He enabled and encouraged the president’s conspiracy theories about Ukraine’s role in the 2016 election that Trump’s own Homeland Security advisor insisted had been “completely debunked.”
Then, since the November election, Giuliani elbowed past the president’s legal teams — both at the White House and the campaign — to play the lead carnival barker of a “stolen election” conspiracy so vast that it includes a dead Venezuelan strongman, Chinese Communists and just about everyone shy of Colonel Sanders — though Giuliani would almost certainly entertain that idea if you sent him the evidence from a Reddit post.
A one-man full employment act for fact-checkers, Giuliani has gone around the country lying about evidence that doesn’t exist — while refusing to offer any evidence to judges because there are penalties for lying in court. “I was absolutely shocked to learn that many, many, if not all of our ballots are calculated outside the United States of America,” he declared on his podcast, on which he often sounds like the guy at the end of the bar who needs his car keys confiscated. For the record, ballots are counted in America — and the Trump campaign watched it happen.
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Of all the figures around Trump, including Trump himself, Giuliani’s descent into villainy is the most tragic, because tragedy is about the downfall of heroes. Like all good villains, Giuliani is at peace with what he’s become. When warned by friends he’s setting fire to his legacy, Giuliani said, “My attitude about my legacy is f— it.”
Mission accomplished, Mr. Mayor.
