All the president's goons

The Giuliani affair would be a fitting end to the Trump presidency

Rudy Giuliani and President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images, Giorez/iStock, Asya_mix/iStock)

If President Trump is eventually felled by the comical exploits of his personal lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, he will have no one to blame but himself. From the moment that he descended the elevator in 2015 to announce what would become his years-long grip on American politics and the national psyche, President Trump's greatest weakness has been his tendency to surround himself with cartoonish, wild-eyed cranks who are either too ignorant to understand their own lawlessness or so brazenly immoral that they don't care.

The Ukraine escapade is something that a half-competent, bottom-of-the-class lawyer with even a small shred of integrity could have warned (or tried to warn) the president away from. But that's not the kind of person who works for this president. Late-stage Rudy Giuliani, however he got this way, is the perfect functionary for Trump's Derp State — barely in control of his faculties, gripped by hallucinatory delusions, brimming with bloodthirsty loathing for Democrats, and perfectly willing to commit broad-daylight crimes to cover up other broad-daylight crimes.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.