Rudy Giuliani just made a big mistake with Melania Trump
Rudy Giuliani dug himself a hole this week when he told the truth, or at least part of the truth, about Donald Trump’s involvement in Michael Cohen’s hush money payoff to Stormy Daniels. Now that Trump has publicly swatted Giuliani down for it, Giuliani is trying to find his way out of that hole. Unfortunately for him, he appears to believe that the best way out of that hole is to keep digging.
After Giuliani admitted that Trump had reimbursed Cohen, which meant Trump committed several felony violations of federal election law, Trump announced to reporters that Giuliani didn’t have his facts straight. That was a bad look for a guy who had just joined Trump’s legal team two weeks earlier. Rudy tried to fix things by putting out a statement which framed the payoff as having nothing to do with the election – but he screwed up by dragging Melania Trump into it.
Here’s how Rudy put it: “The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the president’s family.” Of course the affair happened a decade ago, yet Donald Trump and Michael Cohen didn’t feel the need to buy Daniels’ silence until two weeks before the election, so this is a laugh-out-loud lie. Worse for Rudy, he made the mistake of implying that Donald Trump made the payoff to try to protect Melania. Donald won’t care that Rudy is falsely invoking Melania in this manner, but Melania will.
Since Donald Trump’s affair and payoff to Stormy Daniels became public, we’ve consistently seen Melania Trump finding ways to publicly snub him. It’s clear that she’s more bothered by the fact that her failed marriage has become a public spectacle than she is by the mere fact that he cheated on her to begin with. Now Rudy Giuliani has just dragged Melania to the center of it by claiming that Donald and Michael Cohen only did what they did to try to protect her. This won’t end well.
