NPR: The Trump And Rudy Show

Dotard Donnie recently added Rudy Giuliani to his legal sideshow team...and all hell promptly broke out. Possibly senile Rudy spilled the beans that Trump knew about the hush payments to Stormy Daniels, and he told the world. And the next day they walked it back to the swamp.

These two deserve each and their own thread because of sheer incompetence, total boobery and perhaps applied cynicism.

The sheer incompetence was self-evident. The applied cynicism might be harder to discern. Some are calling it "carpet bombing" the facts and cynically trying to complicate the case for Mueller and the government, creating a quagmire or no-win situation. Basically f vck up the process so badly it creates a distraction so the criminals can escape once again.

Somehow it seems right that Rudy help Trump's downfall. My guess is Rudy inadvertently lands the death blow to Trump's illegitimate presidency in an even greater show of senility, boobery and inanity.

NPR: The Latest On Trump's Legal Challenges

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President Trump says White House lawyer Rudy Giuliani needs to get his facts straight. Politico's Josh Gerstein talks to Michel Martin about how Giuliani's recent comments could affect Trump.

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Emmet Flood, one of Bubba's impeachment attorneys, reportedly insisted that Ty Cobb had to go before he came aboard. Flood is thought to replace WH Counsel Dan McGahn eventually. Can't imagine Flood was too stoked by the Rudy shenanigans.

Dude ain't right.

It's weird to think that there are now grown adults who don't remember a time when Rudy Giuliani was considered a great mayor. They'll only know him as this crackpot.

The Sunday political shows and the analysis says Rudy made things worse. He's all over the place and it seems he's on a full media blitzkrieg. This seems to be the new Trump strategy...bombard the media with ******ation and idiocy in what can only be described as intentional chaos.

Quickly, there's control freaks who micromanage taking a dump and telling you about it. Then there's the chaos freaks who get off on creating drama and tension, so they can sit in the middle of this. This would sit well with the malignant narcissism diagnosis many have put on Trump. He doesn't care how, he just cares he's at the center yanking the strings.

Michelle Wolf's words in the WHCD ring more true than ever: the media is complicit with Trump and are profiting off the spectacle in a major way. That's why it's Trump 24/7. They're making bank.

By created more drama each week that seems crazier than the previous week, Trump is gaslighting everyone and the mainstream, corporate media is helping. The contradictions, walking back, lying and general confusion and chaos really doesn't matter...that's the point. Keep everyone off balance and in chaos and you maintain control by default. And the real dirty continues.

The number of headlines by Rudy just over last day are crazy. This has to be the new Trump crazy chaos strategy...just throw everything out there and keeping jawing.

Giuliani says Trump doesn't have to comply with a Mueller subpoena and could invoke the Fifth Amendment (WaPo)

Giuliani: It is possible Michael Cohen paid off other women for Trump (WaPo)

While You Were Offline: Maybe Rudy Can Fail (Wired)

Schiff: Giuliani 'deeply hurtful' to Trump's case (CNN)

Rudy Giuliani says Trump doesn't have to comply with a special counsel subpoena (CBS)

Giuliani doesn't rule out that Trump could take Fifth Amendment in Mueller probe (CNN)

Dershowitz: Giuliani playing into prosecutors' hands (Politico)

Trump Team Takes a More Aggressive Stance on Mueller Probe

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Posture could further delay an investigation already facing a time crunch from midterm election

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Giuliani says he's 'focused on the law more than the facts right now'

I found the second quote and article hilarious because you have to have the fact down if he's dealing with the law. Seems really backwards, or he knows Trump committed crimes...so it links up with the first article: POSTURE AND DELAY. Trump is going aggressive, so he got a pitbull in Rudy. The thing is, some pitbulls are plain dumb, and in the case of Rudy incompetent and senile.

Don't be fooled. Giuliani has a strategy. By Eugene Robinson, WaPo

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There is madness in Rudolph W. Giuliani's incoherence on behalf of President Trump, but there is also method. He's following the Trump playbook: Confuse, distract, provoke and flood the zone with factoids and truthiness until nobody can be sure what's real and what's not.

"We all feel pretty good that we've got everything kind of straightened out and we're setting the agenda," Giuliani, now the mouthpiece for Trump's legal team, told The Post. "Everybody's reacting to us now, and I feel good about that because that's what I came in to do," he said.

He's just messing with us with the bit about getting things straightened out. Let's just say that it's a good thing for him he's not under oath.

Giuliani revealed Wednesday that Trump reimbursed his longtime lawyer, Michael Cohen, for a $130,000 payment he made to porn star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence about an affair she says she had with Trump.

That made Trump's prior claim of total ignorance about the payment a bald-faced lie. So Giuliani changed his story, or embellished it, by asserting that Trump didn't know about the payment at the time it was made days before the 2016 election but found out about it later. When? Who knows?

Giuliani told The Post the reimbursement came out of a $35,000 monthly retainer that Trump was paying Cohen. But he told Fox News that Cohen was "doing no work for the president" at that time. According to the New York Times, the retainer payments totaled at least $460,000. Giuliani told the Times that the payments began after the election, but he told The Post that Cohen might have used some of Trump's money before the election, too.

Why would Trump pay so much in hush money to squelch disclosure of an alleged affair? "Imagine if that came out on Oct. 15, 2016, in the middle of the, you know, last debate with Hillary Clinton," Giuliani said on "Fox & Friends."

Oops. That means the payment to Daniels, which Cohen says he made with funds from his home equity line of credit, could be construed as an unreported and probably illegal campaign contribution, because its purpose was to help Trump win the election. So Giuliani pirouetted once more and said the payment was made "to resolve a personal and false allegation" and "would have been done in any event, whether [Trump] was a candidate or not."

So we're supposed to believe that Trump paid Cohen $35,000 a month to reimburse him for a hush-money payment that Trump, at least initially, knew nothing about. The money went to a woman Trump barely knew he can't claim he never met her, since there's a photograph of them together for an affair he says never took place. And Giuliani says there might be other women who also received hush money, but then again maybe not.

"I am focused on the law more than on the facts right now," he told CNN, without apparent irony.

In terms of his legal skills, I think it's clear that Giuliani has lost a step. Or two. One day he maintained there was no possible election-law violation, the next day he made a circumstantial case that there indeed was a violation. Decades ago, when he was busting up the New York mob, he never would have made such a rookie mistake.

But I also believe his satisfaction with his media blitz is genuine. Following the FBI seizure of Cohen's files, the whole truth of the Daniels payment and any others was likely to come out anyway. Giuliani preemptively offered several versions of that truth, allowing Trump's supporters to choose the one they find least appalling.

He also managed to voice a confident-sounding, if wholly fictitious, rationale for Trump to stonewall special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Giuliani knows full well the Constitution neither states nor implies that "a president cannot be distracted by a criminal investigation." But some people who heard him make that ridiculous assertion to Sean Hannity probably nodded and said sure, that makes sense.

Giuliani is obfuscating, not clarifying. He's making it harder to know even what the president claims, let alone what the truth might be. As a legal strategy, this would be insane. But it's really a political strategy.

Congress poses the only serious threat to Trump, in the form of impeachment. If the president's loyal base can be flimflammed into thinking this is all a big witch hunt, Republican lawmakers will stay in line. At least for now.

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This is a good read. Pretty much identifies the Trump method, which is the same as old school fascists and sundry Nazis. Generally speaking the fascist playbook is:

A) Distract, confuse, change the subject, move the goal posts
B) Blame the victim, play the victim
C) Lie, make sh!!t up
D) Mix and combine A, B and C...then ATTACK!

Seems part of the point in bring in Rudy is to scare Michael Cohen.

Michael Avenatti is of the opinion tRump and Rudy are not playing 3 dimensional chess.

Giuliani's bumbling media blitz might be a calculation, not a mistake

Methinks Rudy is there to add to the chaos and try and distract from the real stuff going on; the Russia money laundering operation run through the Trump org.

More distractions hmmm lol

Everything going as planned

I don't buy this "twelve-dimensional chess" thing. Yes, Trump and his team do crazy things that distract people. No, I don't think they are terribly self-aware about it. It's just in his nature to be chaotic.

I agree, they're not smart enough to plan this. There's little organization to the chaos and the only objective is confusion and distraction.

No way they could see the Stormy Daniels things blowing up like that, or plan it...but they're spinning it and playing it now with Rudy. They have taken the sh!!t/fan approach: throw everything at it and see what flies, what sticks and then play whatever comes up, stinks the most or needs attention. The problem is they're still incompetent.

1998 Giuliani debunked 2018 Giuliani on presidents evading subpoenas

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Back then, President Trump's lawyer said a president called to testify has "no choice" but to comply.

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