The Slatest

Rudy Giuliani Is Really Not Helping Donald Trump Right Now

Rudy Giuliani and Bill Clinton at Monday night’s debate in Hempstead, New York.

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Donald Trump took to the airwaves Tuesday morning to attack former Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, who Hillary Clinton brought up at Monday’s debate, for having gained weight. He’s also whining that he should get credit for not having mentioned Bill Clinton’s infidelity, suggesting that debate organizers conspired to give him a bad microphone, and complaining that moderator Lester Holt asked him tough questions.

Trump’s staff and advisers ostensibly exist to stop him from engaging in these kind of petty rants. Tuesday, though, prominent Trump supporter Rudy Giuliani is out in the media amplifying them. From Politico:

“I sure would’ve talked about what she did to Monica Lewinsky, what that woman standing there did to Monica Lewinsky, trying to paint her as an insane young woman when in fact Monica Lewinsky was an intern,” Giuliani said. “The president of the United States, her husband, disgraced this country with what he did in the Oval Office and she didn’t just stand by him, she attacked Monica Lewinsky. And after being married to Bill Clinton for 20 years, if you didn’t know the moment Monica Lewinsky said that Bill Clinton violated her that she was telling the truth, then you’re too stupid to be president.”

Monica Lewinsky has never said that Bill Clinton “violated” her, and Hillary Clinton did not make any public comments about Lewinsky’s mental state at the time of Lewinsky’s affair with Bill Clinton. (The most generous reading of Giuliani’s remarks is that he might be referring to a 2014 revelation that Hillary Clinton may have told a friend during the scandal that Lewinsky was a “narcissistic loony tune.”) At the time of the scandal, incidentally, Rudy Giuliani was cheating on his wife, who his divorce lawyer would later compare to a pig. Trump himself disparaged his first wife after cheating on her. Truly two men who are committed to the respectful treatment of women!

Giuliani also declared that Trump should boycott the next two debates because, I guess, Holt pointed out a few times that Trump was saying things that were not true:

“If I were Donald Trump I wouldn’t participate in another debate unless I was promised that the journalist would act like a journalist and not an incorrect, ignorant fact checker,” Giuliani said. “The moderator would have to promise that there would be a moderator and not a fact checker and in two particular cases an enormously ignorant, completely misinformed fact checker.”

It’s clear, at the least, why Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump get along.

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.