Caroline Giuliani, the 35-year-old daughter of Rudy Giuliani, explained on CNN Wednesday what motivated her to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris—a decision that she said hasn’t yet come up in conversations with her MAGA father.
Giuliani, who threw her support behind Harris in a Vanity Fair column Monday, first told CNN’s Erin Burnett how she came to that conclusion, which wasn’t “made lightly.”
“Figuring out how to articulate these feelings with the storm that I’ve been experiencing over the last couple of years—the emotional storm was really hard, and also figuring out if I had the fortitude to share it, knowing that it could definitely damage my relationship with my dad in the last years of his life was really, really painful,” she said on OutFront.
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“But at a certain point earlier in this election, I think it all felt kind of surreal when Donald Trump became the candidate. It was like, I can’t believe this is really happening—after everything that he’s done to our country, after being the first president to not participate in the peaceful transfer of power. It didn’t feel real,” continued Giuliani, who said her own familial plans factored into her decision-making process.
“I’m recently engaged. I’m thinking about having children. I very much want to have children, and one day I just thought about what I would say to my children in the future and in that moment—and everything just became incredibly real,” she said.
“I want to live in a country where if I have a little girl, I want her to have autonomy over her body. And if she becomes a boy, I want her to feel safe and respected in this country. she said. And no matter the gender of my children, I want them to live on a planet that’s habitable, and I would really also like them to live in a democracy. So the stakes all hit me at once, and I knew I had to use every resource at my disposal to get this message out there, that we need to elect Kamala Harris.”
Giuliani said she hadn’t spoken with her father since her endorsement, but that he knows where she stands and so it shouldn’t surprise him.
“I didn’t let him know I was writing this specific article, but along the way I’ve always made my opinions clear, and he does know that I was raised to speak my truth,” said Giuliani, who has supported Democratic presidential candidates—including Hillary Clinton—as far back as 2008.
“I don’t think any of it will come as a surprise to him,” she added. “I still worry that it will hurt him, and I do hope he knows that I love him. I hope that was clear. But we haven’t spoken about it yet and probably won‘t for a while.”
Burnett then noted the former New York mayor’s disbarments in New York and Washington, D.C., over his 2020 election lies, as well as indictments in Georgia and Arizona for trying to interfere in those states’ election certifications. He also declared bankruptcy last year after being ordered to pay a $148 million defamation judgment to two Atlanta poll workers.
“Do you fear your dad will ultimately go to prison?” Burnett asked.
“I mean, of course that’s a terrible thing to think about and I—it is a fear, and… I don’t like to think about it,” she said.
“I try to focus on the future, and I know that we don’t have a future as a country—at least not in any recognizable, recognizable form—if we do not vote for Kamala Harris, because Trump has already made it very clear he’s going to try to do the exact same thing in 2024. He is going to try to steal—to say that he won this election no matter what the actual result is,” she said.
Trump indicated to advisers before the 2020 election that that was indeed his plan, as stated in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s unsealed filing Wednesday in Trump’s Jan. 6 criminal case.
