President Donald Trump and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani attempted on Friday to mitigate the damage caused by comments made by the former mayor on Wednesday night.
In a statement released on Friday, Giuliani attempted to "clarify the views" he had expressed two days earlier on Sean Hannity's Fox News program. During that show, Giuliani tried to defend the president from accusations that he had somehow been involved in arranging for $130,000 in hush money to be paid to Stormy Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford), a porn star who has claimed to have had an affair with the future president.
"I was talking about the $130,000 payment, the settlement payment, which is a very regular thing for lawyers to do. The question there was, the only possible violation there would be, was it a campaign finance violation? Which usually would result in a fine, by the way, not this big Stormtroopers coming in and breaking down his apartment and breaking down his office," Giuliani told Hannity on Wednesday.
He then added, "That was money that was paid by his lawyer, the way I would do, out of his law firm forms or whatever funds, doesn't matter. The president reimbursed that over a period of several months."
In Giuliani's so-called clarification, he attempted to spin his comments to be less damaging to the president.
"There is no campaign violation," the statement said. "The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President's family. It would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not."
Giuliani added, "My references to timing were not describing my understanding of the President's knowledge, but instead, my understanding of these matters."
The former mayor also took shots at former FBI Director James Comey, who the president fired last May. Yet when the president himself spoke with reporters about Giuliani's comments to Hannity on Friday, he also focused on the Stormy Daniels saga.
"He'll get his facts straight. There has been a lot of misinformation. I say, You know what? Learn before you speak. It's a lot easier," Trump told reporters on the tarmac of Andrew Air Force Base on Friday, according to CNN.
The president added, "He really has his heart into it. He's working hard. He's learning the subject matter."
Trump also claimed that "everything said has been said incorrectly" and insisted that Giuliani had only "started yesterday" at his current job, even though the former mayor had announced he was joining Trump's legal team more than two weeks ago.
"When Rudy made the statements — Rudy is great — but Rudy had just started, and he wasn't totally familiar with everything," Trump told reporters. He also made it clear that "we're not changing any stories. This country is right now running so smooth and to be bringing up that kind of crap, and bringing up witch hunts all the time, that's all you want to talk about."
Trump's desire to reverse (or revise) Giuliani's statements runs against the grain of the strategy he pursued on Thursday, when he took to Twitter in an attempt to spin rather than outright deny them.
While it remains to be seen whether the spin doctoring by Trump and Giuliani will repair the damage done to the president's Stormy Daniels story, one thing is clear: The man once referred to as "America's Mayor" has forever changed his public image as a result of his efforts to defend the president. As retired FBI supervisory special agent James A. Gagliano wrote in an editorial for CNN on Friday:
Giuliani appears to have become a supplicant, desperately desirous of remaining in good favor with Trump. We know that this President rewards unquestioned loyalty, even when grievous tactical mistakes appear to have been made. Kellyanne Conway, anyone?
Giuliani is simply performing a redux of that "Happy Days" episode in 1977 when Fonzie, adorned in swim trunks and leather biker jacket, donned water skies to jump the shark.
The phrase "jump the shark" has become ubiquitous in American pop culture, referring to something once great that declines in quality and popularity.
That beloved ABC sitcom never survived the jump.
And neither will the once-stellar reputation of America's mayor.
Yet there is much more at stake here than Giuliani's reputation and legacy. As The New York Times noted, Trump's comments to the press only compound the sense of confusion surrounding this stage of his presidency:
The American public learned its president, once described by a doctor as “the healthiest individual ever elected,” actually wrote that description himself, leaving his health ranking among those who held the office before him a mystery. Mr. Trump also hired an attorney he previously had deniedrecruiting. And the president contradicted himself when, this week, he said he paid back Mr. Cohen for the $130,000 given to Ms. Clifford just days before the election. Last month, the president said he did not know anything about the transaction.
The likelihood is that, for anyone who already supports Trump and resents the efforts to hold him legally accountable for his potential crimes, Giuliani's statement and Trump's denials will be sufficient to convince them that no wrongdoing occurred. Similarly, it is probable that people who are already predisposed to think the worst of the president (as well as the former mayor, whose tenure was very controversial) are going to believe Giuliani and Trump are lying now and that the former mayor accidentally told the truth on Hannity's program.
When all is said and done, the question that matters most is whether Trump's and Giuliani's stories will be considered plausible by swing voters. If a large enough number of swing voters have lost faith in the president's word, then no amount of spin will be able to repair that damage. Politically speaking, it will fall on the president and his new lawyer to figure out a way to protect the White House from the ongoing scandal — and that will start, obviously, by getting their stories straight.
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