Rudy Giuliani’s boneheaded reference to Donald Trump murdering James Comey
Maybe Rudy Giuliani mistakenly thought he was helping Donald Trump flex his muscles. Maybe Rudy just thought he was being funny. Or maybe the man’s brain has so thoroughly turned to jello that at this point, words are just pouring out at random. Maybe Rudy is indeed purposely trying to take Trump down. No one knows what’s wrong with this guy anymore, but we do know this: wow did Giuliani ever screw up when he started talking about murder.
Rudy Giuliani was trying to make the case to the Huffington Post over the weekend that Robert Mueller cannot subpoena or indict Donald Trump in the Trump-Russia scandal. Rudy’s argument was that a sitting president cannot be subjected to the legal system under any circumstances, and that impeachment is the only method of dealing with the president. That’s the precise opposite of the legal precedent on the books, but okay, fine, whatever. Then Rudy began talking about Trump murdering James Comey. No, really.
Giuliani actually said this during the interview: “If he shot James Comey, he’d be impeached the next day. Impeach him, and then you can do whatever you want to do to him.” Wait, what? Look, we get the legal argument that Rudy is trying to make here. He’s saying that no matter what a sitting president does, impeachment is still the only legal remedy allowable, and the Judicial Branch can’t touch him while he’s still in office. Again, Rudy is 100% wrong here, but whatever. The trouble is that Rudy is talking about Trump murdering a witness against him.
There were any number of hypothetical felonies that Rudy Giuliani could have cited in the interview in order to get his point across: robbing a bank, etc. But he made a point of choosing a hypothetical that paints Trump as a would-be dictator with aspirations of murdering his political opponents in cold blood. If Trump wants to salvage what’s left of his failed presidency, this is precisely the kind of image that he and his people should be working overtime to push back against, because it’s the kind of thing that’ll prompt those nonpolitical Americans still on the fence about him to finally decide that he needs to be ousted.
The Resistance’s argument against Donald Trump just became so much easier when it comes to convincing the people in the middle to take a stand against Trump. All we have to do is point the to the part where Trump’s top goon is running around bragging that Trump could murder the former Director of the FBI and he still couldn’t be arrested for it. This kind of cartoon villainy may fire up Trump’s maniacal base in his favor, but it fires up mainstream America against him. Team Trump just (metaphorically) shot itself in the foot.
