What Trump Learned From Giuliani
By Ron Mwangaguhunga
Where does Rudy Giuliani begin and Donald Trump end?
Campaign Endlessly
For over 30 years, New York’s twin terrors — Trump and Giuliani — have fed off each other’s white grievance politics in ways that went beyond the borders of the Empire State. This witches sabbath began formally in 1989, when Trump co-chaired Giuliani’s first campaign fundraiser and donated $3,000. In that campaign, Rudy, then the politically dominant partner, lost his Mayor’s race, but immediately thereafter began a racially polarized endless campaign against Dinkins from 1989–1992. Dinkins was never given a chance to govern undistracted. Is Biden about to experience this long war political strategy?
Never Concede Anything
After that loss, Rudy never stopped campaigning to be Mayor. It is not inconceivable that Trump follows the Giuliani 1989 playbook and does to Biden what Rudy essentially did to Dinkins, namely: 1) Never concede, 2) claim, forever, some sort of election fraud, and 3) Never stop campaigning and being a distraction/disruptive presence in the life of the victor, consequences to the commonwealth be damned. After losing fair-and-square in 1989, Giuliani maintained that Dinkins, the victor, had somehow cheated. (Note Giuliani still to THIS DAY believes there was fraud in the 1989 Mayoral election — sound familiar? ) Trump — as of December 14 — has yet to concede the 2020 Presidential campaign.
Law and Order
Did Trump learn anything from Rudy’s years in the wilderness between the time of his loss to Dinkins and his election as the 107th Mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001? Is Trump’s plan to regain the Presidency against Biden modelled after Rudy’s long-term, asymmetrical Forever Campaign? It is instructive to look at Rudy’s boozy racist gathering with tens of thousands of protesters, many off duty police at the height of his years in the political wilderness. Further, Giuliani broke off Jewish support, usually a Democrat party mainstay, by portraying Dinkins as weak on law and order. Trump has been obsessed with both the law and order strategy, as well as fracturing Jewish-American support among the Democrats (which has the added benefit of solidifying his evangelical base).
Rudy rode the Crown Heights riots, which began in 1991, to the Republican nomination. The Crown Heights riots began when, on August 19–21, 1991, a black child was killed and his cousin seriously injured by a driver in the Lubavitcher Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s motorcade. Was David Dinkins wholly to blame for the rift between the black and Lubavitch Jewish communities? Legitimate criticism arose over the then-Mayor’s handling of the riots, but Dinkins never stopped trying to engage the Jewish community. “There is not a single shred of evidence that I held the [New York Police Department] back — and there never will be,” Dinkins said in a speech at the Jewish Theological Seminary after the riots. “And every time this utterly false charge is repeated, the social fabric of our city tears just a little bit more. It must stop. It’s got to stop.”
Giuliani fancied himself a modern day Elliot Ness. Rudy in his prime was an old hand at Law-and-Order campaigns, first with Wall Street perp walks when he was US Attorney, then against hundreds of thousands of people of color that were stopped and frisked during his tenure. That 1992 riot was to protest Mayor Dinkins calls for civilian oversight of the police. Trump in 2020 tried to attach Biden to the defund-the-police movement, which Biden never supported. Down ticket Congressional races, however, benefitted from Trump’s law and order appeal, according to Majority Whip James Clyburn.
Trumpism takes Giulianiism to the next level, into the national political arena. According to The Wall Street Journal Database (and a nod to The Marshall Project for bringing up this fact) Trump and Pence mentioned the specific term “law and order” more than seven dozen times. Appearing unquestioningly “pro-police,” clearly, was a fundamental aspect of Trump’s 2020 campaign.
Further, Trump, a native New Yorker, proudly accepted the endorsement of the New York Police Benevolent Association as well as the biggest national union group, the Fraternal Order of Police in 2020. “You’ve seen on the right, particularly under Trump, a sort of ramping up and sort of hyper-politicization of those law-and-order politics to say that, you know, there is no room for any criticism of police,” said William Jones, a University of Minnesota professor who’s studying the history of police unions, to NPR. “And that’s something new.”
Trump’s rowdy white working class rallies bear some similarities to Giuliani’s police riot. That racist cop riot had thousands of demonstrators blocking downtown Manhattan traffic in September 1992. One year later, Giuliani beat Dinkins, largely on the police are always right argument. If Trump has taken anything away from his political association from his “mentor” it is the linkage of law-and-order campaigning and white grievance politics in the suburbs.
Rudy benefitted from New York’s working class white vote in the outer boroughs. Staten Island provided Rudy’s margin of victory in 1992 and is the closest thing to the suburbs in NYC politics, with its white Republican-friendly outer borough terrain. Trump could not have been blind to the effects of this. “To this day, Staten Island is the only borough in New York City that has supported Trump in both presidential elections,” Ross Barkan notes in Jacobin.
Defund or Reform?
The tactic ultimately failed nationally. Arguably, the “Defund the Police” movement cost the Democrats the Senate. The last two outlying Senate races in Georgia are already taking up that question. Obama, the most effective African-American politician in recent memory, has been critical of the Democrat response to Trump. We are at present in the middle of a Progressive-versus-Centrist reckoning over that argument. The last vestiges of Trump’s law and order appeal, however, are on full display in the final flurry of executions that will no doubt continue, bloodily, until the President is finally ushered out the door in January.