Former New York City mayor and longtime Trump ally Rudy Giuliani is not taking well to the recent suspension of his license to practice law in New York. This week, a New York appellate court formally suspended Giuliani’s law license, characterizing him as a liar who spread falsehoods about last year’s presidential election in his “capacity” as a lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump. During a subsequent appearance on the far-right channel known as Newsmax, Giuliani claimed that “America is not America any longer,” as though a hardly unforeseeable consequence of Giuliani’s documented lying is some kind of harbinger of destruction.
In reality, ex-President Trump himself has made clear that Trump World’s vision of so-called democracy involves nearly free reign to say and do whatever the former president and his political cohorts want while their political opponents get silenced. The standard for democracy, though, isn’t whether Rudy Giuliani, as a lawyer, gets to lie at the dangerous level at which he’s done so without consequence. That’s not “democracy” — it’s egomania. Giuliani’s insistence that democracy in America has been jeopardized in the wake of his suspension over proven lies is laughably self-centered and just ridiculous.
As Giuliani angrily put it to Newsmax host Greg Kelly:
‘All I can tell you is: America is not America any longer. We do not live in a free state. We live in a state that’s controlled by the Democrat Party, by Cuomo, De Blasio, and the Democrats. We have a double standard. There’s no doubt if I was representing Hillary Clinton, I’d be their hero. I represented my client so effectively, that they’re trying to get me to shut up because they know what’s gonna happen – because they did it – they know what’s gonna happen in Arizona, and they know what’s gonna happen in Georgia. And they want this mouth shut.’
Is there anything at all that could convince Giuliani of the reality in front of him that there was no systematic election fraud like he has obsessively claimed? Arizona and Georgia, both of which were won last November by Joe Biden, have figured prominently in false claims from Giuliani and others about the integrity of last year’s election. Yet, no legitimate evidence has ever emerged of systematic fraud. Concurrently, no court anywhere in the entire country has ever accepted the idea that systematic election fraud was present.
Giuliani’s suggestion that “they did it” appears to reference his idea that Democrats perpetrated a far-reaching election-rigging scheme, but he’s never even been able to comprehensively say who “they” are. Who was in charge of the imaginary fraud? Where are the thousands of people whose assistance would have no doubt been required for such a fraud scheme? Shouldn’t someone making allegations as serious as the ones Giuliani has put forward at least be able to provide provable answers for these very basic questions?
