It turns out that the whole time Rudy Giuliani was trying to sell a sex scandal about Hunter Biden, going on about “a number of photographs that show very explicit sexual activity, and other very personal things,” he was waiting for his own (latest) sex scandal to drop.
The cousin-marrying, thrice-divorced frequent cheater isn’t easily embarrassed, but Sacha Baron Cohen may have just pulled it off with his big reveal in the new Borat movie: Rudy, alone in a hotel room with the woman playing Borat’s daughter, who he thinks is a TV interviewer, lying back on a mattress and appearing to touch his genitals.
People often accuse Trumpworld of projection, but this feels like a peak. The president’s personal lawyer, who’s also seen in the film touching her butt as she helps remove his microphone, says that he was just tucking his shirt back in. Sure! Who doesn’t lie with their back flat on a bed to tuck their shirt back in?
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The scene was shot in July, so Giuliani has had months to come up with an explanation and this is the best he can do. Back when it happened, his communications director spun it as “Un-fooled and placid, Mayor Giuliani notified security to call the police. It was then, upon hearing the word police, Cohen turned from a screaming banshee into a fleeing hyena. I hear he was last seen running down the street in his bathrobe. Better luck next time, Sacha!” She added that her boss had “foiled Sacha Cohen’s attempted scam-interview, ultimately ending in a stupefied Cohen.”
Now, the scene is out (the movie streams starting Friday, but the Guardian reported on Rudy’s scene Wednesday and screenshots popped up shortly after that) and, well, it sure doesn’t seem like America’s mayor foiled Cohen, or that Cohen is the one who’s stupefied here. Also, what does “un-fooled and placid” mean in this context or in any context?
Rudy’s grotesque misadventure is no deviation from the norm, for him or for Trumpworld, a place characterized by disgusting misogyny or as Donald likes to call it, locker room talk. Just this month in Trumpworld we’ve seen former Republican National Committee Deputy Finance Chairman Elliot Broidy, who you might remember as the guy who gave his mistress herpes and then paid her to have an abortion, pleading guilty to "conspiring to violate foreign lobbying laws as part of a covert campaign to influence the administration on behalf of Chinese and Malaysian interests.” The president’s campaign manager Brad Parscale was tackled by police in his Florida home after his wife told the police he’d assaulted her, before recanting. They’re reportedly back together. And then there’s the president’s rape case, which is making its way through the courts with a lot of sketchiness via Bill Barr’s Justice Department and a new allegation of sexual assault, this one at the U.S. Open.
Rudy, of course, has his own sordid history spanning three divorces including the one he announced at a city hall press conference before telling his wife (his second wife, the one he started dating while still married to his first wife who also happened to be his second cousin), to a series of tabloid dating misadventures. While married to his second wife and squiring his future third ex-wife, he billed taxpayers for his lovenest. That might be where his police commissioner, close friend and now convicted felon Bernie Kerik got the idea to use an apartment at Ground Zero not to oversee recovery efforts but as his own lovenest while his cops toiled to recover bodies.
Rudy on Wednesday stressed that he never took his clothes off, though of course Cohen leaping into the room screaming “put down your chram” while “wearing a crazy, what I would say was a pink transgender outfit” as Rudy described it in July, might have had something to do with why his pants stayed on.
And there may be some relevant family history here, since Rudy’s father Harold Giuliani seems to have had his own issues with keeping it in his pants. As the Washington Post reported, Harold told his friend and a teenage Rudy’s mentor Jack O'Leary that he’d been arrested on suspicion of loitering in the restroom of a local public park and that, while Harold insisted the whole thing had been a misunderstanding, he “kept returning to his only child, and his fear that the incident might forever haunt Rudy.”
That 60-year-old incident may not have haunted Rudy. This three-month-old one certainly will.
