Rudy Giuliani once captivated Americans with his take-charge leadership after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. He was Time magazine's man of the year.
That's hard for most under-30 voters to grasp. The former New York City mayor has suffered one embarrassment after another ever since, and has become a staple of comedians' jokes.
This was on display last weekend when, in his role as a leading surrogate for Donald Trump, he went on TV-interview shows to proclaim that the Republican presidential nominee was a "genius" for declaring $916 million in losses that he could use to legally avoid paying 18 years of federal income taxes.
Giuliani also suggested that "everybody" has extramarital affairs, and didn't back down from an earlier assertion that Hillary Clinton was "too stupid" to be president if she didn't immediately believe Monica Lewinsky's account of her White House trysts with President Bill Clinton. The most memorable of Giuliani's encounters was a testy exchange with CNN's aggressive Jake Tapper, who challenged the ex-mayor to defend what he called "unhinged" accusations by Trump about the Clintons' marriage.
Nevertheless, Giuliani is a Trump confidant and loyalist. In those weekend interviews he argued that Trump won the debate against Clinton.
If Trump becomes president, Giuliani is prominently mentioned as a possible attorney general--he was U.S. attorney in New York in the 1980s--or Homeland Security chief or even director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Any of those appointments would produce interesting Senate confirmation hearings.
Editorial on 10/05/2016