Rudy Giuliani vs. Donald Trump: Who would you vote for?

Rudy Giuliani vs. Donald Trump: Who Would You Vote For?

Rudy Giuliani vs. Donald Trump: Who Would You Vote For?

Who's winning, who's losing, and why.
Oct. 21 2016 10:55 AM

Rudy Giuliani vs. Donald Trump

Who would you vote for?

161020_POL_Trump-Or-Giuliani
Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani

Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Paul J. Richards/Getty Images and Ty Wright/Getty Images.

Donald Trump is the most-disliked presidential candidate since polling firms started tracking Americans’ distaste for major-party contenders. While Hillary Clinton is the second-most-loathed candidate of modern times, she’s still no competition for the Republican nominee. Is there anyone on this or any other planet who’s sufficiently disliked to lose to Trump in a one-on-one election? In the runup to Nov. 8, we’ll attempt to answer that question by presenting a series of hypothetical presidential matchups. While Slate readers voted for Dick Cheney in his matchup with Trump, will they show the same ardor for former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani? Read the arguments in favor of both candidates below, then vote in the poll at the bottom of the story.

Vote for Giuliani: Look, I found the manic Mussolini schtick Giuliani pulled at the Republican National Convention as unnerving as the next guy. His attempt to resurrect his political career by glomming onto Donald Trump’s historically corrosive candidacy has been nothing short of disgraceful. But one of these men is a race-baiting, adulterous, megalomaniacal reality TV star who allegedly sexually assaults women, lacks even a bare trace of public policy knowledge, and is actively undermining the norms of American democracy. The other is a race-baiting, adulterous, megalomaniacal former mayor who competently ran the most important city in the country for eight years before steering it through a national tragedy. Given that choice, I’ll take the race-baiting, adulterous, megalomaniac who hates ferrets.

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Giuliani was a mixed bag even at his best, and he’s always been a disaster on race issues. Before he got elected to City Hall thanks largely to white voters, he helped whip up a police riot against the New York City’s first black mayor. His NYPD gave us Abner Louima and Amadou Diallo. I shudder to think what horrors would emanate from the Giuliani White House in the era of Black Lives Matter, which he’s called “inherently racist.”

But Giuliani could on occasion be smart, pragmatic, and even reassuring. The cliché is that he proved New York could be governed after years of (literally) riotous disorder. There’s a lot of truth to that, even if the city’s astonishing drop in crime wasn’t totally (or even mostly) his doing. He was the sort of Republican mayor who, faced with a massive budget gap upon entering office, worked with the city’s unions to find savings without laying anybody off. He backed a Democrat, Mario Cuomo, for governor. And for all the self-mythologizing B.S. that came after, he was good and steady on Sept. 11, which counts for something. Can you begin to imagine what it would have been like having Donald Effing Trump as mayor that day? Can you, Henry?

The man has since curdled into a caricature of his darkest impulses—on civil liberties and national security, he comes off a bit like Dick Cheney with a lisp. But when he’s not talking about how swell it’d be to put electronic tags on Muslims, he still sometimes shows flashes of decency. He seems to have been a voice of sanity in Trump’s circle on immigration, for instance. Just as the faint embers of fatherly love turned Darth Vader back toward the light, perhaps there’s just enough of the old moderate city pol left in Rudy to make him a less disastrous president than Donald Trump is guaranteed to be.—Jordan Weissmann

Vote for Trump: Obi Wan-Kenobi asks: “Who’s the more foolish: the fool, or the fool who defends him on the Sunday shows?”

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That’s easy: The greater fool in this case is and always will be Rudy Giuliani, that humorless engineer shoveling coal on the Trump train. My colleague Mr. Weissmann is not wrong when he describes America’s saffron ape-clown as a unique threat to the polity. I won’t defend Trump. He is indefensible. And yet there is one man who will excuse his behavior when no one else will, one vile ghoul who rationalizes all of Trump’s improvised idiocy and inherent nastiness, often with more fervor and more desperate circumlocutions than the candidate himself. Supporting Donald Trump in the manner Giuliani has supported him is more damning than even being Donald Trump.

Trump and Giuliani share all the same reprehensible views. (Like the belief that black Americans and women don’t know what’s best for them. Trump as president would be “better for the United States than a woman,” Giuliani said.) But there is something disarming about Trump’s relentless bumbling, his total lack of calculus, the way he gritted his teeth and tore up his notes after the debate, his goofy grin as Hillary roasted him at the Al Smith dinner. Trump lies constantly, but he doesn’t lie strategically—he seems incapable of any long-term thinking at all. In the rigid context of Washington politics, that makes him a less frightening figure than his conniving surrogate.

Consider the brownshirt ex-mayor, 15 years out of work, waving the frog flag in Trump’s parade. Watch his scowling death’s head as Hillary mocks him.

This is a man who would chew through his own leg for power. That dog whistle that Trump wears around his neck? Giuliani built that. He’s the link between the open hatred of Trump’s campaign and the more calculating, corporate-friendly oppression and war-mongering of the mainstream Republican Party. As president, he would give us the worst of both worlds.

(And if I even need to say it anymore: He was a carny mayor and would never have been posing with a bullhorn on the streets of Lower Manhattan on Sept. 11 if he had not opted, against expert advice, to place the city’s emergency command center on the 23rd floor of the World Trade Center.)—Henry Grabar

Previously in Who Would You Vote For?
Dick Cheney vs. Donald Trump

Henry Grabar is a staff writer for Slate’s Moneybox.

Jordan Weissmann is Slate’s senior business and economics correspondent.