Rudy Giuliani’s Twitter meltdown shows Trump legal team is in deep trouble
As the great and good of Washington lined up in the Capitol Rotunda to pay their respects to the late president; as Brexit untangled in the House of Commons; and before the Michael Flynn indictment came through and people realised that all the good stuff was still redacted, Donald Trump’s number one fan (and umpteenth lawyer), Rudy Giuliani, took to Twitter in order to berate Twitter.
The “text” (Dear lord! Do keep up Rudy. We’re in 2018!) was an earlier tweet in which the former New York Mayor had written that “Mueller filed an indictment just as the President left for G-20”. He had then written, “In July he indicted the Russians who will never come here just before he left for Helsinki.” Fatefully (thank you Fate!), he had omitted a space from between the two statements causing Twitter’s code to interpret the series of characters “G-20.In” as a web address, specifically one under the top-level “.in” domain usually reserved for Indian websites. This resulted in the tweet containing a hyperlink to a non-existent website which, needless to say, didn’t stay non-existent for very long. A website builder in Arizona, Jason Velazquez, quickly purchased the domain and set up a simple landing page declaring that “Donald J. Trump is a traitor to our country.”
It really is the stuff that dreams are made of… Or at least, dreams for anybody fascinated by American politics and the quirks of modern technology.
Yet as far as the story goes, this is one of those Giuliani blunders, like the time he dressed in drag in order to smooch The Donald, that will be relegated to the great Trivial Pursuit card of history. Linger on it a little longer, however, and it offers some insight into the legal jeopardy to which Trump is now exposed.
The first realisation is that Rudy really does seem to be driving the Trumptrain alone from the locomotive. That is itself quite astonishing. It’s all too easy to look on American politics as we do other aspects of a culture where celebrities are carefully protected from the public as well as from themselves. That Giuliani is out there, alone, directing the president’s legal defence, is more shocking than learning that Russell Crowe writes his own tweets. Except, of course, Russell Crowe doesn’t write his own tweets. He has the sense to hire experienced people to write them for him.
Rudy, on the other hand, seems to be by himself when it comes to flubbing his way from one interview to the next, taking time on his meandering schedule to go off the rails about a simple matter of technology. If he can get Twitter so wrong, what does that say about his understanding of constitutional law?
The result is conspiracy hokum of the worst kind: that of a New World Order of internet giants maliciously interfering in political matters. To be clear: there was no dark magic at work and the mistake was of his own making. He complains that “The same thing-period no space-occurred later and it didn’t happen” which is true. He did type “he left for Helsinki.Either could have been done earlier or later” but, again, where is that person capable of explaining that Twitter’s code is clever enough to recognise valid domain names? There are many strange and exotic top-level domains (for example “.bingo”, “.hair” and “.rehab”) but “.either” isn’t one of them. That’s why Twitter didn’t turn it into a link and why Ruby should feel blessed that nobody bought www.helsinki.either and turned it into a website.
That the legal advisor to the president believes otherwise is appalling but so too is the incompetence on display. Trump’s presidency has rested on the instincts of people like Giuliani, supposedly the “very best” that America has to offer. Yet the efforts of the “very best” have become an extremely powerful argument in favour of hiring people who might simply be proficient at their jobs.
Certainly, “proficient at their jobs” is not a phrase you often hear used to describe Trump’s legal team. As his lawyers have deserted him, he has increasingly turned to men like himself, raised in the bearpit of media and PR. TV law professor Alan Dershowitz has his ear, though what he whispers into that ear remains as murky as Dershowitz’s defence of Jeffrey Epstein for whom, it emerged this week, he still works as a lawyer. It explained the prominence of Michael Cohen, the foul-mouthed attorney cum Goodfellas goon. It explains why the-actually-proficient John Dowd quit once it became apparent that there’s no strategy that can save Trump from himself. And it explains why Giuliani again matters in the high affairs of state.
Even at the height of his powers, Giuliani was never simply about serving the law. As U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, his strategy of tough justice merely underpinned a crafty media campaign meant to raise his profile. His name is forever associated with the “perp walk”, by which publicity seeking officials walk the recently arrested through a public place in order to give photo opportunities to the media. Since then, Giuliani became a fixture on cable news, trading on the acclaim he won as “America’s Mayor”, bestowed on him after the leadership he displayed in the aftermath of 9/11. Fame seems to have dulled his legal sense. He routinely offers advice that is clearly misleading or, more likely, pandering to the President’s demand for another Roy Cohn, a loyal advocate who would trade principle for proximity to the Oval Office. It’s why Rudy’s Twitter mistake matters.
It might well be an error that anybody could make but the fact that there’s nobody there to stop Giuliani is another insight into the fragility of Trump’s team. If there’s one thing we’ve learned from the indictments handed down by the Office of the Special Counsel is that Robert S. Mueller and his sizable team of legal experts do not make such mistakes.
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