For someone who's firmly remained anti-mask during the pandemic, Rudy Giuliani showed his love of them on a certain reality show called "The Masked Singer." Apparently, the former Trump attorney is apparently a contestant on the next season of Fox's wildly popular singing competition, where masks are a strict requirement.
According to Deadline, Giuliani was unmasked as a costumed contestant during last week's taping of the Season 7 episode, and as expected, it wasn't without some controversy. Following Giuliani's dramatic unveiling, judges Ken Jeong and Robin Thicke promptly walked off stage, albeit briefly, while judges Jenny McCarthy and Nicole Scherzinger allegedly stayed put.
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Although the episode hasn't aired yet — it's slated to sometime next month — Giuliani's cameo quickly incited complaints on social media. A fun reality show is not going to make us suddenly not remember the role he played in Trump's tumultuous presidency, which was spent pushing lies, endorsing mistreatment and fueling violence. Let's not forget that Giuliani also made claims of voter fraud after the 2020 presidential election and afterward, hosted a botched press conference at Four Seasons Total Landscaping.
Even though Trump's reign has come to an end, his closest companions don't deserve to be celebrated or erased of their misdeeds on national television. As Salon's Melanie McFarland wrote, "[W]e cannot allow them to dance their way onto the broader stage of business-as-usual normalcy. That wouldn't merely be unjust. It would be dangerous."
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Giuliani is not the first politician to make a surprise appearance on the primetime singing competition. In May 2020, Sarah Palin stirred the pot after revealing herself as the masked cotton-candy-resembling Bear. Although no explanation was needed — or wanted — for her feature, the politician later said that she took part in the show as "a walking middle finger to the haters out there."
"It was all about the mask," she told host Nick Cannon, per Entertainment Weekly. "I knew it would be so refreshing and so freeing and well, in a real respectful way, kind of a walking middle finger to the haters out there in the world where I could do whatever I wanted to do and not care what anybody said because they wouldn't know until after the fact. So it all worked out."
As of now, Giuliani's costume and selected song have not been revealed. According to Deadline, the theme for the upcoming season is comically "The Good, The Bad and The Cuddly."
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